


Take the Lively Air

by halfpenny_jones



Category: Tangled (2010)
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/F, Gender or Sex Swap
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-28
Updated: 2012-12-04
Packaged: 2017-11-13 21:38:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 25,538
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/507979
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/halfpenny_jones/pseuds/halfpenny_jones
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Rapunzel learns it's mostly in the wrists and a little in the hips, and a lot to do with leaping before you look. Response to the prompt: how would the story change if a girl had climbed Rapunzel's tower instead?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. learn by going

\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

_Title and chapter names taken from Roethke's 'The Waking'._

_\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------_

 

### 1\. learn by going

She was getting good at this, actually. It was mostly in the wrists and a little in the hips. The clang the skillet made when it hit the intruder's head was a lot more resounding than the one it made when Rapunzel accidentally dropped it on her own foot, and was, from the sound of it, a lot more painful. "I think you knocked out my eyeball," the intruder said. "It must have rolled under the table. You're all sideways."

"Your chair tipped over," Rapunzel said. "Do we have a deal?"

"You know, I thought about being freaked out by the hair," the intruder said, "but mostly, right now, I'm mad as hell. It's weird."

" _Do we have a deal_."

"My _eyeball_."

~^~

Rapunzel couldn't figure out what 'simpatico' meant, but whatever it was, the woman (Flan? Faline?) wasn't budging. "This is your last chance," Rapunzel said. "Say no one more time, and I'll beat the right answer out of you."

"Your negotiation skills need work," the woman said. "Also, I can't hear you very well when your dragon's tongue is _stuck in my goddamn ear._ "

~^~

"Just so you know? It was the tongue that convinced me," Flynn Rider said, and disappeared over the windowsill.

Rapunzel anchored her hair in the hook and tried not to faint. Flynn was picking her way down the stones with a cross call of _you coming Blondie_ and didn't seem all that sympathetic to the fact that this was momentous, this was ruinous.

The drop she'd been staring at all her life loomed in front of her. Her idea was stupid and reckless and _this would kill Mother._ She could never… but Pascal was anchoring himself in a tendril of her hair, smiling his chameleon smile at her, and suddenly Rapunzel realized, yes, she could.

She took a deep breath, gripped her hair hard, and launched herself out of the tower.

She got grass stains everywhere.

~^~

The second thing Flynn did at the beginning of their journey was to try to cut Rapunzel's hair. The first thing she'd tried to do was lose her over the side of a ravine. "The answer is no," Rapunzel said.

"As much as I've enjoyed watching your mood swerve from one extreme to the other for the past twenty minutes," Flynn said, "it's cost us some time. The festival's tomorrow night, in case you haven't invented calendars up in your tower yet. We've got a lot of ground to cover. In the meantime, your hair is dragging seventy feet behind us and is probably bringing half the forest with us."

She was still out of breath. She'd been swinging from a tree giant enough to block out the sky and then weeping inside a cavern that her mother would hate her, would hate her _forever_ , and also the world was glorious and that was almost worth her mother hating her forever.

Flynn's expression was stirring up something else. Neck prickling, Rapunzel closed her hands into fists gently, willing them not to start trembling. "That wasn't part of our deal," she said.

"I'll be honest, I don't remember much about our deal except it hurt a lot," Flynn said. "I'll make it quick. Like pulling a tooth."

"The answer is _no_."

"Listen, do you want to get to the city or not? Because at this rate we'll get there in time for your next birthday, and trust me, your mother's bound to notice something's up by then."

The rest of her was beginning to shake. She had to turn back. If this were any other day she'd have turned back twice already. Except that the sunlight felt too hot on her skin and her legs were hurting and she didn't know what to do anymore, because today wasn't any other day, and her hurts were good hurts. Hurts that she needed to feel more of before her life went back to being not a life.

Unable to move, unable to think, Rapunzel stood still, gripping the earth with her toes.

To her surprise, Flynn abruptly threw up her hands. Without another word, she spun on a heel and stormed down the path.

Not believing her luck, Rapunzel stood there for a while. Flynn's back started to get smaller.

On her shoulder, Pascal nudged her cheek and flicked his tail questioningly. _Back or forward_.

Rapunzel let out a breath that hitched slightly, then bent to gather up her hair. Before Flynn could round the bend, Rapunzel was running to catch up. She didn't let go of her hair even when the muscles in her arms began to burn.

... the forest was beautiful.

 

~^~

 

Flynn's knife made a second appearance twenty minutes later.

Somewhere around the point where Pascal began pantomiming dismembering Flynn and hanging the parts as markers to guide them on their way back, Rapunzel had recollected herself. She decided that while she'd reached her quota of physical violence today, _suggesting_ violence was something else entirely. Clearly the problem wasn't going away on its own. It was now or never. Back or forward.

She planted her feet, dropped her hair, and heaved her skillet up in front of her, two-handed.

Flynn performed a remarkable acrobatic feat: she spun around and at the same time leapt back, putting a sizeable amount of distance between them in one movement. On cue, Pascal started hissing on Rapunzel's shoulder. "Here's the deal, _Flynn Rider_ ," Rapunzel said.

"Ah, okay, wow," Flynn said.

"You caught me off-guard before, but let me _remind_ you that the location of the satchel is something only I know, and if you _ever_ want it back—"

"Okay, okay, okay, shh," Flynn said. "Is there any reason we aren't discussing this calmly? Without weaponry? Without your dragon giving me the stink-eye?"

She could feel her knees already beginning to lock again. "I am calm."

"You're holding a skillet in my face."

"You're holding a knife."

"Your skillet has made a lot more contact with my head in the last couple of hours than my knife has made with yours."

She lifted the skillet higher and forced herself to think critically. This was too much to handle. Too much of a risk. The whole idea had been stupid, but the grass under her feet had felt like a prayer and she'd lost her head. "I don't even know what I'm doing," Flynn said. "I'm still half-convinced I'm knocked out. This is the strangest standoff I've ever been in. Where are your shoes?"

"I don't wear shoes."

"Why is your frog glaring at me?"

"He's a chameleon."

"Why do you not wear shoes and why is there a chameleon glaring at me?"

Lose Flynn in the forest, maybe? Something needed to happen here. She needed to go back to her tower and… except Flynn would come after the satchel. Maybe knock her out first, and then gather up her hair, and then go to the tower, and then she…

... and mostly she was just getting confused, because it didn't really seem like Flynn was angry. All in all, it seemed like she was just as puzzled as Rapunzel.

Looking at her, Rapunzel realized that this was a point of contention that couldn't be settled without divulging dangerous truths. Her hair was simply a part of life, as much a non-negotiable appendage as her arms and legs. Never mind explanations. She needed to get to the heart of the matter, or risk losing everything.

She said, "I want your solemn word."

"On what?" Flynn looked wary, but at least she was no longer flipping the knife.

"I want your solemn promise that you won't try to cut it. Today or tomorrow."

"Why?"

"Promise me."

Flynn didn't look thrilled at the prospect. "What about the day after that?"

"The day after that, you and I will be strangers," Rapunzel said tightly.

Flynn glanced at Pascal.

"Look at me." Rapunzel straightened her elbows. The edge of the skillet nearly touched Flynn's nose.

For nearly a minute neither of them moved. Rapunzel could hear the sounds of the forest all around them, all-encompassing and smothering and dense. Everything was dazzlingly green.

Flynn said, "Fine."

"No. You have to mean it."

"Fine. I mean it."

"Promise me," Rapunzel said between her teeth.

" _I'm not going to cut it._ I promise. Today or tomorrow. Geez."

She slowly lowered the skillet. "Dream or not, you sure have a lot of trust," Flynn said. "You know that? The word of a thief doesn't mean much in civilized society."

"Promises are forever no matter who you are." Her heart was still pounding, but she'd done it, hadn't she, she'd done it and now she and her hair and Pascal had survived and that was more luck than she deserved. "If you promise something, you mean it with your heart. It's more binding than chains."

"Well, it's not more binding than your hair, that's for sure," Flynn said. "Now that we've wasted valuable daylight, you want to eventually, you know. Get to your city?"

Rapunzel thought, somewhat dazedly, _well, yes._

 

 


	2. great nature

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Yellows, purples, roses.

2\. great nature  
\- - -

 

She wrote in her mental journal, _touch_. Just like the times she’d navigated her tower by feel alone, just to see if she could. The grain on the banister, the sturdy oaken stairs, the whorls of dried paint on the walls – textures she’d had memorized by the time she was six. With practice, she’d trained her hands to see as well as her eyes.

Now the world was exploding around her and all she could think of was _touch_. Tree bark. Thorns. The line of ants she allowed to march over her feet until Flynn bellowed for her to catch up. She should have brought her paintbrushes, because that’s what this was about, wasn’t it? Capturing the colors from the outside and smoothing them into her walls so she’d never have to leave again.

Seeing as they’d gotten things more or less sorted out, her natural curiosity eventually got the better of her. In between pointing out things that caught her eye – a bird’s nest, a pawprint, the tremendous girth of a grandfather oak – she peppered Flynn with questions. Where was she from? What was her family like? Did she like to cook? What was her favorite meal? Did she like animals?

Flynn barely responded, grunting occasionally to a yes or a no question. She did respond when Rapunzel asked which direction they were going (southwest) and then offered to throw together some makeshift shoes, because seeing her stumble over the gouges in the footpath was getting on her nerves.

It was nice – the first nice thing Flynn had done, really – but Rapunzel wanted to feel the road under her feet. Every turn, every smooth rock, every tuft of roadside weeds. Things speaking of _horizon_ , and _soon_ , and the swell of lights over the treetops after the sun set.

  
~^~

 

Flynn’s shoulders were getting tense. After consideration, Rapunzel decided that it had to be the talking. Mother told her several times a day that she talked too much. On the other hand Flynn _wasn’t_ talking, and someone had to fill the silence, because silences themselves were tense. Or maybe it was the skipping?

In the spirit of not pushing her luck, she forced herself to walk and toned down her observations (— really, she did, except for that gorgeous flower and would Flynn mind if she picked it, and were there any rules about picking flowers and did Flynn want one) and kept a grip on her hair so she could weave the train around obstacles.

She was in the middle of not necessarily saying everything she wanted to say about the sap on the side of the tree, because it really was fascinating, and could they perhaps eat it on toast, when Flynn finally spun to face her.

Startled, Rapunzel skidded to a halt. The woods tested the sudden silence with cautious spats of sound: a bird peeping in the canopy, a squirrel jumping from one branch to another overhead.

Flynn’s mouth made several movements with no sound. “What?” Rapunzel said.

Flynn turned away just as abruptly as she’d stopped.

Rapunzel watched as she started to bang the bushes around them. Low-hanging branches were next, followed by leaves on the ground. Pascal came out from under the curtain of Rapunzel’s hair to watch. Standing back, Flynn began scanning the tree trunks, hands on her hips, looking cross and sweaty and not even slightly in the mood for anything Rapunzel had to say.

Rapunzel said, very cautiously, “What are you looking for?”

Flynn didn’t respond at first. Then she said, shortly, “Twine.”

“Um,” she said. She’d read her text on indigenous flora from cover to cover one hundred forty and a quarter times, and though she was hardly worldly, she was fairly certain twine didn’t grow in the wild.

“Or that is,” Flynn said, “I’m looking for something that acts like twine, because my satchel has mysteriously disappeared. How, you ask? No, that would spoil the mystery. You want to know what else disappeared? I’ll give you a hint. My blanket. And my long glass. And my food. And my rope, and my fishing hooks, and my map, _and my twine_.”

Rapunzel wisely ignored a surge of guilt. “Why do you need twine?”

“Because,” Flynn said, “ _because_ , I am not going to spend another second on this green earth with your hair dragging seventy feet behind us, giving us away to any head hunter or predator that wants easy booty. Is why.”

Rapunzel glanced at Pascal, who flicked his tongue out at her in a chameleon shrug. “You promised—”

“Oh, yes,” Flynn said grimly, eyeing the vines growing up the side of the tree. “I promised.” And then she flipped her knife out of her boot and began sawing.

Pascal was making jerking motions with his tail, which had gone purple to match the color of her dress. The translation was easy. _Run_.

She nearly did. Her leg muscles tensed, but something didn’t let her. Flynn, apparently satisfied with her find, briskly cut the vines into pieces the length of her forearm, then stuffed them all in a pocket and came for Rapunzel.

Out came the skillet. “Easy, Blondie,” Flynn said, putting her hands up peaceably. “I’m just going to put it up.”

“You stay away from me,” Rapunzel said.

“Just want to get it off the ground.”

Off the ground? ‘Put it up’? “Oh, come on,” Flynn said. “If I can’t do at least this, I’m going to hang myself. That’s all there is to it. I will really hang myself with your hair. And then you will have my mottled and purple corpse to lead you into town, and you can add me to the collection of live animals you’ve been dragging around in your hair for the last several miles, and you can give us all to the children in the city to play with in exchange for a tour—”

“Stop it,” Rapunzel protested, taken aback by the casual gruesomeness. She lowered her skillet reluctantly. “I just… I don’t know what you mean. That’s all.”

Flynn did stop at this. Her eyes met Rapunzel’s, and for the first time Rapunzel noticed the color. Brown, but not the brown she used for definition on her walls. Brown like tea. “Wait,” Flynn said. “You’ve never put up your hair? Not once? In your entire life?”

Confusion kept her rooted to the spot. “The stuff stretches from yesterday to next week,” Flynn said. “You mean to tell me you’ve never tied it up? Gotten it out of your face? Ever?”

… oh, _that_. Rapunzel relaxed a little, but didn’t let go of the skillet. “Mother didn’t like me to.”

“Well,” Flynn said. “Far be it from me to question the wisdom of a mother who kept you locked up in a tower for eighteen years. Now that that’s all cleared up, turn around. And get that demon off your shoulder. It looks like it wants to eat me and I’ve got enough to worry about right now.”

Rapunzel slowly moved her hands onto her hips. It didn’t seem like an unreasonable request. In fact, it almost seemed… nice, in its own way. All the same, she said, “I’m warning you. If you try to cut it… if you even make a _move_ to cut it, I’ll—”

“I said I wouldn’t, didn’t I? Turn around.”

She set her skillet down on the ground, easing Pascal off her shoulder. Then she stood, rigid, as Flynn worked her fingers through the hair over her neck.

Strangely, the touch served to calm her down more than anything else. She shivered involuntarily as fingertips brushed the back of her neck, and then again when her hair was being divided into three parts, parted at the nape. “Don’t laugh,” Flynn said stiffly as she worked, misinterpreting the movement. “I haven’t had to do this since I was a kid.”

“I wasn’t.”

“And don’t move.”

She stood still as Flynn began to move away, hand over hand, parting the hair foot by foot.

 

~^~

 

A minute later she said, “Flynn, have you ever—”

“No talking either.”

 

~^~

 

“Hey, Flynn—”

“ _No_ ,” Flynn said, somewhere behind her. “I told you, this is not an excuse for us to get cozy, Blondie. This is strictly business. Also, because I know you’re going to keep asking anyway, I don’t do back-stories. I also don’t do stand-up comedy and backward dive rolls, but only because I’m afraid of getting my neck broken. That goes for all three of them.”

“I was just going to ask you about your hair.”

“I thought hair topics were off-limits.”

Well, yes. Other off-limit topics involved her mother, Pascal, and whether she went around nude in the tower when she was alone. The last one was on the list only because Flynn had asked first. “For you. Not for me.”

Flynn grunted, but without seeing her face it was hard to tell what it meant. “Did you used to have it long?” Rapunzel asked. “I mean, to know how to do this.”

For a minute Rapunzel thought she wouldn’t answer. When she did, she sounded distracted. “For a while. Almost to my knees.”

“What happened? Did someone steal it?”

“Steal it? What is it with you and… people do not _steal hair_. For your information, I cut it myself.”

“What?” Rapunzel twisted her head around, drawing an exasperated noise from Flynn some thirty feet behind her. “Why?”

“It was in my way. Turn back around. This is hard enough without you squirming around.”

It was in her way. Rapunzel turned her head, blinking into empty space. Of course hair got in the way, that’s what it was for. That’s why you learned to work around it, to include it in your chores. “But didn’t your mother braid it for you?”

Flynn didn’t respond, but that could have been because she was now thirty-five feet away and getting further, working down the long column of hair, separating it foot by foot by foot.

Despite the instructions, Rapunzel turned her head again to watch, not moving until Flynn curtly called for her to turn her head forward, for god’s sake, do you want me to hang myself with your hair, and she turned back, staring at the copse of trees at the end of the clearing. She didn’t ask any more questions.

 

~^~

 

The task ended up taking a full two hours. Flynn’s knees were dirt-caked and she kept massaging her hand, but in the end Rapunzel’s hair was securely roped and twisted and looped together in a single, graceless column ending an inch above the ground.

Her head felt strange. Feeling like she was going to tip over, she steadied herself against a tree and waited for her body to adjust to the new center of balance. “ _Finally_ ,” Flynn said. “You take that out while I’m with you, I’ll shave you bald.”

“Thank you.” Oddly, she meant it. She moved her feet cautiously, felt the feathery tip of her hair brush her ankles, and an incredulous laugh bubbled up inside her. Well. At least she could run better now, couldn’t she, and she could…

And then there was the realization that no, never mind running. She could dance. She could twirl and spin and fly and jump and fall and cartwheel and pop into a handstand without anything getting in her way, for the first time in as long as she could remember, and nothing could stop her at all.

Ignoring Flynn’s raised eyebrow, she let go of the tree, wobbling a little, and took a few cautious steps. She lifted her arms to balance herself, took a few more. Then she took a few skips, and a few experimental spins, and her hair soared out behind her like an exclamation point.

Flynn said, “If you’re done remembering how to walk, we need to make up some time. Let’s go.”

“Wait.” She was laughing. She was breathless. “Wait, I just need to—”

Flynn kept moving as if she hadn’t spoken. There was a fire under her feet. She wanted to dance so badly she almost risked everything just to say _wait_ again, but Flynn was getting further away and they did have to make up time. Later, Rapunzel promised her feet giddily. Later, and we’ll make it count.

She forced herself to move forward instead, catching up to Flynn and settling behind her, trying to match her longer strides. The woods moved by on either side for another mile, before opening up into the fields, into sky.

A half hour later her neck felt better. She was adjusting – but that’s what she’d promised herself, wasn’t it. To adapt, and to change.

As they walked, color began to flash at the corners of her vision -- yellow, vivid purples, whites and roses.

Every once in a while Rapunzel bent, plucking the flowers deep down on their stems, and replanted them in her hair one by one, letting it absorb the color of the meadow until she could no longer tell where one stopped and the other began.


	3. we think by feeling

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Flowers, monochrome, sopranos.

**_3\. we think by feeling_ **

 - - -

 

 

“Can’t you just catch them with your hands?”

 

“Stop talking,” Flynn said.

 

“You can eat the berries if you’re hungry,” Rapunzel said. “If you’d like, I can show you which ones. My botany text had lots of illustrations to tell you which ones are edible.”

 

“You know what doesn’t need instructions or illustrations?” Flynn said. “A fish. Wriggling on a hook. The hooks that are in my satchel.”

 

“I said I was sorry—”

 

“Show your remorse by _not talking._ ”

 

Unhappy, Rapunzel pressed her lips together. “ _Berries,_ ” Flynn said. “If you really want to help, go rope up a fish with that hair. Though who knows, maybe you won’t need it. Maybe you can talk at them until they jump up on the bank and end it all themselves.”

 

Rapunzel jerked, appalled. “I’m not catching and… _killing animals_ with my hair.”

 

“I didn’t see these moral qualms when you used your hair to catch me.”

 

“I didn’t do it to kill you!”

 

“We’ll see,” Flynn muttered, staring ahead with a very resigned expression on her face.

 

Rapunzel waited a minute, then said tentatively, “You know, if you wanted to, you could eat—”

 

“ _Stop. Talking._ ”

 

 

~^~

 

 

“This’ll go easier if you hold still.”

 

“I am,” Rapunzel said. She tried to hold her breath, remembered it might be better to breathe, and ended up exhaling sharply when Flynn’s fingers pinched her skin again. “ _Ow._ ”

 

“If you’d just let me make you some shoes—”

 

“I wouldn’t know what to do with them.”

 

“You put them on your feet. And then you don’t get splinters. It’s one of those preventative things.”

 

Rapunzel gasped again when Flynn dug into her skin with fresh vigor. Flynn’s gaze took the briefest of detours, flickering up to hers and then back down to the task at hand. “You know,” Flynn continued conversationally, “in all the old tales, bare feet represented innocence. All the pure, beautiful maidens never wore shoes. It was said to disrupt their connection to the earth.”

 

“Really?” She was breathing too quickly. She swallowed, latching on to the casual tone, fighting the urge to take her foot away and let down her hair and heal it herself, the way she’d healed the splinters she’d gotten as a child. Instead she endured it, foot hopping a little in Flynn’s grip as Flynn increased the pressure. “You think I’m a beautiful maiden?”

 

“I think you’re a giant pain in my ass,” Flynn said, and with a final pinch worked the splinter out, making Rapunzel yelp. “Now _stop talking._ ”

 

 

~^~

 

 

“Why do you keep sneezing?”

 

“I’m not sneezing.‘Rapunzel’ is my _name_. Not ‘Blondie’.”

 

“It sounds like the noise old Bergam makes when he’s coughing up breakfast. What the hell does it even mean, anyway?”

 

Rapunzel paused, hoping she wasn’t as impressionable as Mother had always told her she was. She’d already have to bathe to remove the smell of the wilds before Mother returned. Accidentally absorbing the local vernacular... that’d be a little harder to rinse away. “Mother told me it’s an herb from her country. She said when she was young she used to eat it every day – put it in stews and stuff, you know.”

 

“Never heard of it.”

 

“I think it goes by other names, too? It grows purple flowers in the summer.”

 

“A purple flowered herb? What, like… wait, you mean rampion? The _salad_ herb?”

 

“That’s it!” Rapunzel was pleased, mostly because Flynn wasn’t telling her to shut up. “So you see, it’s a _name_. And you should call me by it, _Flynnigan Rider._ ”

 

Flynn grunted. “S’too hard to say.”

 

“So is Flynnigan. So maybe I should call you ‘Meanie’ instead and see how you like it.”

 

“As much as that would break my heart in twain and so on,” Flynn said, “it wouldn’t be the worst thing I was ever called.”

 

Rapunzel took a steadying breath, determined to bring civility back into the conversation. “Anyway, I told you what my name meant. What kind of a flower is a Flynnigan?”

 

“The kind that’s hungry enough to eat its own arm, and then your frog for dessert.” Flynn abruptly veered down the left fork of the path, into the sunlight. Peering down the path a ways, Rapunzel could finally see what Flynn saw: a building with a sign out front emblazoned with the words _Snuggly Duckling_ , leaning forward as though it were bracing itself against the wind. “Now shut up and follow me before I decide to flavor both of them with rampion.”

 

… well, she did like ducklings.

 

 

~^~

 

 

“Oh, come _on_ ,” Flynn said two minutes later, somewhere down on the ground. “Can’t your freakout wait until after we’ve eaten?”

 

“Go away.” Pascal sat on the branch above her, seemingly torn between protecting her and casing the insects crawling on the bark.

 

Flynn’s voice came again through the green. “Blondie, come on. It was just a joke.”

 

She turned her face into the bark to hide, even though she knew Flynn couldn’t see her. “You can’t stay up there forever,” Flynn said.

 

 _Go away._ She also thought, _yes I can._ Mother always complained about how stubborn she was. She could, because down below was smoke and giant hands and face hair and creatures lifting her hair from her neck and breathing on the skin and, and, but there was also the lights and the city and she pressed her face closer to the trunk and started to cry. “Oh, shit,” Flynn said.

 

“Go away,” she sobbed.

 

The tree shook. Rapunzel made herself smaller, hoping the leaves would hide her, but Flynn appeared a few seconds later, scratched and sweating, twigs in her hair, up from the nearest shelf of leaves. “Now listen,” Flynn said, out of breath, and abruptly lost her grip.

 

Rapunzel’s hand flew out automatically, lightning-quick, snagging Flynn’s sleeve. The sudden weight nearly yanked her out the tree as well, but just as quickly Flynn caught the branch with her free hand, and together they managed to haul her back up onto it again. They clung there for a moment, breathing hard.

 

Rapunzel said, “You tricked me.”

 

“I didn’t realize you’d _run._ ” Flynn was several shades paler than normal, but she’d more or less recovered her composure. “You reacted a lot more crazy than I—”

 

“Well, that’s what you hoped, wasn’t it?” Rapunzel snapped. She was still crying, but this was… and suddenly she realized why she was shaking. It wasn’t fear. It was _fury._ “You took me in that… that horrible place and hoped that I’d run screaming right back to the valley—”

 

“I was hungry!”

 

“—hoping they would h-hurt me or steal my hair—”

 

“Or?” Flynn said. “Hoping to _get some food._ ”

 

“I trusted you,” Rapunzel whispered. She scrubbed at her wet face with her palm, but it was dirty. She felt grimy all over – bruised and stuffed up and miserable and desperately, horribly homesick. “I should never have trusted you.”

 

“ _Yes!_ ” Flynn said in exasperation. “Exactly! You should have never trusted me! What did you think was going to happen when you went off with a total stranger?”

 

“I don’t know.” There was a roar building in her ears. She resisted the urge to put her hands over them and closed her eyes instead, centering herself on the rough seat of bark underneath her. “Go away.”

 

“I take you into a tavern and at the first sign of trouble you shoot up the tallest tree in the forest like a demented squirrel. How are you supposed to handle yourself in town, if you’re so afraid of people?”

 

“Go away.”

 

“And me, you think I asked to be dragged all over the countryside? A countryside, by the way, which is populated by people who really, really want my head? Preferably separated from my neck?”

 

“Then go.” Her chest was heaving, but she wasn’t crying anymore. She kept her eyes closed. “I’ll find my way to the city by myself.”

 

There was no reply. When the roar eventually died down, Rapunzel opened her eyes to find Flynn staring at her with hard, unblinking scrutiny. Compared to her usual monochrome shift between boredom and indifference, the intensity was almost refreshing. “You sure don’t make things easy, do you,” Flynn said.

 

The fury came rushing back instantly. “It’s _you!_ ” Rapunzel shouted. “This was _easy,_ we had a deal, you just had to take me from the tower so I could see the floating lights and bring me back and you never would’ve had to see me again—”

 

“I didn’t ask to get knocked around with a frying pan, and I sure didn’t ask to be dragged out as an escort just to get my own property back—”

 

“Then _go!_ ” Rapunzel kicked out, nearly shoving Flynn off the branch again. “What are you waiting for? I’ll follow the lights myself and I’ll find my own way back and I d-don’t _need you anymore…_ ”

 

“Easy!” Flynn’s hand snaked out and caught her wrist. “Just _wait_ a second.”

 

“ _Let go!_ ”

 

“For god’s sake, Blondie, you’re acting like this is the first time you’ve ever seen a—”

 

And Flynn stopped, very abruptly.

 

She could hear the tavern down below, the laughter and the shouts, but it all seemed muted. The birds had stopped singing a while ago, alerted to the confrontation, and the wind had stopped moving through the trees, leaving the canopy still.

 

All at once, Rapunzel felt tired. Her skin felt hot and sensitive from where the sunlight had beaten down on it. Her legs were sore and so was her neck. She wanted to be at home doing puzzles with Pascal, or baking cookies for Mother.

 

Distantly, a little impersonally, she wondered if she’d ever be able to get back down to make cookies for Mother again. Maybe she really would be stuck up here forever. Or maybe she could take out her hair and swing from tree to tree until she – but no, then Flynn would catch her and shave her bald.

Flynn suddenly spoke, bringing her out of her thoughts. She sounded resigned. “Well, I guess there’s some things we should clear up first.”

 

Rapunzel couldn’t look at her. “They’re not all like that,” Flynn said. “I didn’t… I mean, I did, because _food,_ but it’s not exactly the most elite crowd in there. If I’d remembered, I’d… I wouldn’t have. I really wouldn’t.”

 

“Mother said they had fangs.” Rapunzel’s voice was small. “I should have believed her.”

 

“They do not have _fangs._ A lot of them don’t even have teeth.”

 

“Mother said they were all ruffians—”

 

“The scariest thing about them is their smell. And maybe their bad taste in living room curtains.”

 

A joke? Rapunzel reconsidered jumping. At least then she could get her skillet. “Here’s the bottom line,” Flynn said. “I need food. This is not a joke. I can’t catch it with my bare hands, and berries make me poop. Sooner or later, this tavern visit has to happen.”

 

“I can’t.”

 

“Why not?”

 

 _Because I’m not you._ The odd turn in Flynn’s personality and the sensation that things were moving too quickly around her were making her light-headed. Mother had told her she couldn’t, that’s why, and Mother never lied. Because Rapunzel was gullible and she was clumsy and she burned dinner and…

 

… and Flynn wasn’t a man. Men were monsters with fangs and claws and appetites. The tavern had proved it. Lying there on the floor in the tower, Flynn had had all the same curves and facial features that Mother did. Eyes, nose, rounded ears, blunt white teeth.

 

Rapunzel had assumed that because Flynn looked normal—because she wasn’t a man—that she wasn’t dangerous. Now she was trapped out here with this creature that looked like her and spoke like her, but acted in treacherous, unpredictable ways.

 

It didn’t make any sense to say it out loud. She was too tired. “I’m sorry, Flynn,” she said. “You’re right. You were right the whole time. We can go back to the valley if you want.”

 

She expected Flynn to jump at the opportunity. Oddly, Flynn didn’t say anything at all.

 

Rapunzel’s back began to hurt. She stared at a point beyond Flynn’s head and listened to the raucous sounds floating up from the Snuggly Duckling. It had smelled good, she realized, now that her panic had died down. Mostly bad, but some good too. A little like pancakes, maybe a hint of cheese.

 

“Okay, you’re killing me,” Flynn said, and held up her hand. “Look.”

 

She was done looking. She shuffled her feet in preparation to climb down.

 

“Stop squirming and _look_ for a second.” Flynn tightened her grip on her wrist. Rapunzel tugged, almost succeeding in pulling away, but Flynn only gripped harder, halting the motion, and they ended up holding hands instead.

 

The accidental intimacy of the contact was enough to make her pause. Reluctantly, she looked down. Her hand seemed small and pale in Flynn’s. There were tiny scars peppering Flynn’s fingers, running in and out of the mashed-down knobs of her knuckles. The largest stretched across the back of her hand like a grin.

 

The size of their fingers was nearly the same, she realized, looking at them a bit closer. Slender and tapered. Hers were a little ink-stained, but otherwise they—

 

“Crotches,” Flynn Rider said.

 

Rapunzel jerked her head up to meet her gaze. “I’m really good at kicking crotches,” Flynn said. “In fact, I once kicked a man’s crotch so far up his body he cried yellow. I got that scar on my hand from punching someone so hard they lost four teeth. I can make a man’s foot go so far up his ass he’ll have to walk from his face.”

 

Flustered and confused, Rapunzel felt her face heat up. “Wha—”

 

“I can stomp a man’s toes into duck feet. I once got myself over a ravine by swinging off a man’s nose hairs. I once climbed the side of a fortress in the middle of the night by feel alone, with both feet tied behind my ears. Your crisis of confidence,” Flynn said, “is happening at a really bad time. I mean if this had happened right outside your tower, I’d be thrilled. Now we’re halfway to the city and it’s just annoying.”

 

“I’m sorry, Flynn,” Rapunzel said. “I know you’re strong, but it’s different with me, I can’t—”

 

“Who says? Your mother? Your dragon? Look at our hands. We’re not that different. If I can do those things, so can you.”

 

“It’s not the same,” she said, and somewhere in the back of her head, her mother said, _of course it’s not._

 

“Of course it’s not,” Flynn said. “It’s a stupid comparison. If you ever tried to start a fight with someone, one of the deer you picked up in your hair while you were dragging it around the woods would run off with you. But my head hurts, and I’m pretty sure you had something to do with that. Anyway, what do you know? You’ve only ever seen yourself in your mirror. You’re out of your tower now. Who knows what kind of reflection you’ll have the next time you look.”

 

She could hear a crash from inside, followed by a drunken roar of laughter. “I’d go on, but this is boring and I’m out of good advice,” Flynn said. “We’re eating now. And if you have a problem with that, you can stay in the tree until I come out.”

 

Not going back. It was the only coherent thought in her head. _Not going back._ Also that the hand around hers was warm, and despite what Flynn said, she didn’t look bored. In fact, she looked a lot like she was waiting for Rapunzel to talk.

 

Rapunzel said, “Okay.”

 

“Okay?”

 

“Okay.”

 

“Good.” Flynn loosened her grip.

 

Rapunzel committed the feel of it to memory, then let go herself.

 

Okay then.

 

~^~

 

… and, apparently, Flynn turned into an excellent mezzo soprano when two dozen singing thugs were pointing knives at her throat. 

 

 

 

 


	4. climbs a winding stair

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Chess, tightropes, potatoes.

**4. _climbs a winding stair_**

**** _\- - -_

 

She’d been in the middle of exchanging cupcake recipes with a man whose hands were bigger than her head when the commotion came from outside. “So, these men want to capture you?” Rapunzel panted.

 

“Yeah, I dunno why.” Flynn was ahead of her. She rounded the next bend at a sprint, boots skidding in the loose stone. Behind them, the secret passage trembled with the ever-nearer roar of pursuit. “Something about impersonating a royal guard and stealing a priceless heirloom intended for the beloved missing princess, but who can keep track of these things.”

 

 

 ~^~

  

“You touch that and I will shave you smoother than a baby’s—”

 

“ _Flynn_ —”

 

“Stop it, _you stop that right now,_ you take any more out and I swear I’ll—”

 

“Flynn that _horse has a sword._ ”

 

 ~^~

 

 

 They survived the initial rush of water by running into a seam in the side of the mountain. Rapunzel had approximately two seconds to feel relief before she realized that boulders had formed a seal over the entrance and the water was rising fast. “So, this was a bad idea,” Flynn said.

 

“I’m sorry,” Rapunzel said. “This is all my fault.”

 

Flynn had already dived down several times, each time coming up more bedraggled and less enthusiastic about the situation in general. She hoisted herself up on a small ledge next to Rapunzel by clinging awkwardly to the slippery wall of the cave. “Don’t worry about it.”

 

“But…” At least she wasn’t crying. She felt strangely numb. “We’re going to die, Flynn.”

 

“I guess.” Flynn tried to blow her wet hair out of her eyes with no success. “My only regret is not being able to shave you bald like I promised. I _told_ you not to take that hair out.”

 

She’d had to. A fifty foot jump down to the canyon floor, and while Flynn talked a good game, Rapunzel was fairly certain the drop would have won. Rapunzel stared at the dark mass of hair trailing down into the water, and randomly wondered what would happen to it. Would it turn brown too, like the tuft behind her ear? Or would it live on after she’d ended, waiting for someone else to come and claim it?

 

“Eudora.”

 

It took a moment to realize Flynn had spoken. Distracted, Rapnuzel spared a moment to glance over. “What?”

 

“My name.” Flynn tried to shift herself on the rock and nearly tumbled into the water. She’d cut her hand on one of the jagged rocks lining the cave earlier and could no longer seem to tighten her grip. The water level was rapidly climbing over their hips, which wasn’t much of an improvement over being chased down by a gigantic armed warhorse. “It isn’t Flynn. It’s Eudora. Eudora Fitzherbert. I figured you should know before we died.”

 

“… oh.” Now that she was thinking about it, something was whispering in the back of her mind. Something about light and hair, and, but for a moment the world narrowed to Flynn’s carefully averted gaze. “Really?”

 

“It’s the only thing my parents ever gave me. Well.” Flynn squinted down at the water. “That and a lifetime of abandonment issues.”

 

The water sloshed up to her chest. Rapunzel couldn’t tell if she was drowning yet. Death had only come to her in small increments in the tower and had never stayed long enough to leave an impression. Wilted rhododendrons in the vase that Mother soon replaced, desiccated flies crowded on her skylight during the summer. She wondered if death crept through the skin as well as into the lungs, omnipresent like air, or if it were only a slightly deeper, uglier injury, something tangible she could wrap her hair around and sing away when no one was looking.

 

Flynn’s hair was plastered to her head, and the faint suggestion of daylight through the cracks in the cave-in gleamed off a layer of snot on her upper lip, but all in all she seemed rather composed for someone about to die. “Well?” Flynn said.

 

“I think…” The water batted against her collarbone, grazed her chin. All of a sudden the realization surfaced from the dark, and she remembered with a jolt, _light,_ and _hair._ “I think Flynn suits you better.”

 

Flynn’s bark of laughter echoed off the walls, even as Rapunzel’s hair began to glow under the water. “That’s the idea.”

 

  

~^~

 

“You know, it would have been really, really nice if you could have warned me a little ahead of time that you had magic hair that glows when you sing,” Flynn said, and spent a lot of the next ten minutes vomiting onto the bank.

 

Breathing had never felt so good. Sprawled on her back on the soggy earth, alive, Rapunzel wondered if the sky had always looked this blue. “Surprise.”

 

 ~^~

 

Somewhere in her head, she felt like perhaps things should have been different. Brighter, faster. … broader, was maybe the word? She couldn’t imagine the journey any other way, but sometimes, inexplicably, she would look at Flynn’s back ahead of her on the road and see the shadow of something else. Or here, in the campsite, where the firelight kept flickering in and out and around everything, and everything familiar seemed to be something new.

 

_I’ll spare you the sob story of poor orphan Eudora,_ Flynn had said. It seemed to take Flynn forever to braid her hair this time around. They passed the time in silence, too tired to do much talking.

 

Mother showed up at camp while Flynn had gone to get firewood, satchel in hand, winging wildly between accusations and baby talk.

 

Rapunzel surrendered to her embrace, certain that this was the end. She’d had her adventure and she’d almost died and killed someone else in the process, and on cue her mother was here as always to discipline her. Her mother’s arm was firm around her waist as she turned, beginning to lead Rapunzel out of the camp, away from the warmth.

 

And then Flynn’s face came to mind and, tiredly, Rapunzel had said no. _No,_ Mother. It was, actually, the first time she’d ever said it, but oddly enough all Rapunzel could think about was getting sleep. About Flynn, about her injured hand. About her own feet, scraped and dirty and hurting gloriously.

 

_She only wants one thing,_ Mother said. _I’ve seen the way she looks at you._

She said, _I’m staying,_ and just for a second, seeing her mother and her barely-restrained anger, Rapunzel realized for the first time in her life that she didn’t really know her. Not just because she was out of context. Cloaked in the shadows of the campfire, hair flying around her face, Mother looked completely unrecognizable, like someone from another time and place. _I love you,_ her mother said. And _you’ll regret it._ And _Mother knows best._

 

Rapunzel sat with the satchel after she left, barely feeling it in her hands. She was too dazed to take in the fact that she had stood up to her mother for the first time and had won. It felt strangely inconsequential. Somewhere along the line – the Duckling, the dam, setting up camp – looking at Flynn’s back, seeing the strength and the purpose there, all thoughts of failure had been driven from her head.

 

She stood up, hid the satchel, and sat back down just in time to meet Flynn as she came clomping out of the underbrush. “How do you even pull it out that fast,” Flynn was muttering. She dumped her armful of sticks next to the fire, looking exhausted and put-upon. “Takes me two hours to braid it and _you_ two seconds to unfasten it. I couldn’t have shot for a tavern _not_ overtaken by broke head-hunters. Couldn’t have gone to the nice one with the yellow walls and the strawberry dumplings.”

 

Rapunzel took a stick and fed it to the fire. “I’m talking and you’re silent, and that’s too much weirdness for one day,” Flynn said. “What’s the matter?”

 

Rapunzel folded her arms over her chest, then chanced a glance up. Flynn was looking at her expectantly. Her clothing was still damp, her hair fluffed in some places and flattened in others.

 

Rapunzel’s eyes went to her hand. “Well, whatever it is, it’s nothing a good fire can’t cure,” Flynn said. “Unless you have some magical hut-building powers sealed in your hair. No? Okay. No huts. I’ll be back in a few minutes, I’m going to get more firewood.”

 

“Wait,” she said.

 

“Hm?” Flynn half-turned. “Now what?”

 

The sight of the bandage had restored her voice at last. Now that she had a plan, she felt calm again. “Sit down for a second.”

 

“I will in a bit,” Flynn said. “If you want you can—”

 

“Sit down, Flynn.”

 

Flynn stopped. Rapunzel lifted her chin, leveling a look at her. Looking a little taken aback, Flynn sat on the stump.

 

Without explaining herself further, Rapunzel pulled the vine fastening the outermost layer of hair to the master braid. Her hair promptly doubled in length.

 

Flynn was instantly on her feet. “Now _wait a damn second—_ ”

 

Rapunzel pulled her back down. “Hold on. Just trust me, okay?”

 

Flynn’s expression was hard, but she made no other attempt to stand. Rapunzel pulled out the strap, worked her fingers through it until the section hung loose. The weight of her hair was unexpectedly reassuring, and for a second she sat there, watching the firelight catch it as it slid over her knuckles. _I love you,_ she thought, and at the same time, unexpectedly, _I hate you._ “Hold out your hand, okay?” she said.

 

Flynn automatically held out her uninjured one. Rapunzel reached out and took the other. The wound was horrible – angry and jagged, peeking out the sides of the bandage, crusted at the corners where dirt had worked its way underneath. It must have hurt her badly when she was fixing Rapunzel’s hair, but she hadn’t said a word.

 

The sight of it made something in her chest tighten. Ignoring Flynn’s questioning noise, Rapunzel took the bandage off gently, then wrapped the nearest section of her hair around it instead.

 

Flynn’s eyes had gone wide and unblinking, pupils shrinking, the way they had when Rapunzel’s hair had begun to glow in the cavern.

 

Rapunzel paused, searching her face, then blurted, “Don’t freak out.”

 

“Uh huh,” Flynn said.

 

“Because you’re about to freak out now,” she said. “I can see it on your face.”

 

“I’m fine. Really.”

 

“Don’t scream.”

 

“Why would I—” And Flynn shut up when the hair began to glow.

 

There was no reward for doing it slowly. The magic had the same effect either way. Mother had demanded it of her every day, and it’d eventually become just another chore. Sweep the tower, polish the silver, dust the mantle, make Mother young again.

 

This time, for the first time in years, she didn’t hurry the melody. She closed her eyes and let herself feel the full extent of the magic. She brushed the roof of her mouth with her tongue and tasted the grass and the river and the stone and felt the sunlight on her skin, bright and strong, even though it was the middle of the night.

 

The light began coursing through her hair, scrambling over itself in the circuitous path from root to tip. She healed whatever injury she could find, from Flynn’s sore head to her turned ankle to the dozens of tiny abrasions from skidding across the canyon floor.  

 

When it was over and Flynn was done screaming _what are you_ and _where did you come from_ and _why is your dragon smiling at me,_ Rapunzel sat there on the log, feeling breathless and strangely excited. She was back on the edge of the tower, poised to leap into something potentially tremendous and potentially disastrous. “I’m not freaking out,” Flynn said. “This is my not freaking out face.”

 

“Flynn.”

 

Flynn glanced at her. She looked freaked out. “I’d really like to hear it,” Rapunzel said.

 

“Hear _what?_ ”

 

“The story of poor orphan Eudora.”

 

“And bring down the tone of the party?” Flynn laughed. It sounded a little hysterical. “No thanks.”

 

“Tell me a different story, then.” She fastened her hair back up by herself, then scooted closer, propping her chin on her fists. “About one of your adventures as a thief.”

 

Flynn stared at her for a long time. Then she said, “Fine. But _only_ if I get to hear something about you.”

 

“That sounds fair,” she agreed, and thought, _that sounds like a conversation._

 

“It’s not a conversation,” Flynn said. “I’m just trying to get it out of you whether you ever run naked around the tower.”

 

… she probably should have seen that coming.

 

 

~^~

 

 

“Wait a second,” Flynn said. “Your dragon knows how to play chess?”

 

“Yup. Right now the score is four hundred thirty to four hundred eleven.”

 

“In your favor?”

 

Pascal made a derisive sound from near Rapunzel’s foot. “You’re kidding,” Flynn said.

 

“Nope. He also knows how to dance, make candles, polish the floor, and play hide and seek.”

 

“You don’t find this weird?”

 

“Well, he has to do something,” Rapunzel said. “He’s too small for guitar and he’s scared of the oven.”

 

Flynn had a pained look on her face. “What?” Rapunzel said.

 

“You really don’t see anything strange about that at all?” 

 

“Pascal likes to learn new things. He’d be bored if all he ever did was change colors.”

 

Pascal obligingly turned a pleasing shade of blue and then sighed as if to demonstrate how boring it had been to do so.

 

“There’s something wrong with you,” Flynn said.

 

“Why?”

 

“ _Your dragon plays chess._ ”

 

“You think the fact I play chess with him is weirder than the fact I have magical hair?”

 

“… no?”

 

Rapunzel’s chin settled further down into her hands.

 

 

~^~

 

 

“And then I stuck my knife under his buttcheek and said, “If you don’t hand it over in five seconds, that won’t be the only thing coming out of your ass.”

 

“Oh,” Rapunzel said. She smiled tentatively. “Your life sounds so exciting, Flynn.”

 

“I tell you, _that_ particular caper fed me for a month.”

 

“The…” Rapunzel tried to keep the information straight. “The things you got… from his… um...”

 

“No, from his purse. See, he’d just _hidden_ the stuff up his butt.” Flynn popped a berry into her mouth and immediately grimaced. “People will do anythingto hide their valuables. You just have to know where to poke the stick.”

 

“Oh. So you… poked the stick, and his… his valuables came out?”

 

“No. He took them out himself. The stick is just a metaphor.”

 

“Oh. For thieving?”

 

“For accuracy.”

 

“What?”

 

They looked at each other. “Never mind,” Rapunzel said, and busied herself with the suddenly very important task of peeling bark off a twig.

 

 

~^~

 

 

“I don’t know,” she said. “I think it has to be the time I tried to use my hair as a tightrope.”

 

“ _What?_ ”

 

“It’s true,” she said, and found herself smiling despite herself when Flynn grinned. “Don’t laugh! I’d done other things like it when I was painting my ceiling. I thought I’d be able to do it if I stretched my hair out tight enough.”

 

“Yeah, but _hair_ —”

 

“It was long enough. I just, I think I didn’t tie it well enough? I’m not really sure what happened exactly. I just suddenly lost my footing and the end came out of the hoop on the other side, and I went straight to the floor.”

 

“You’re lucky you’re not dead.”

 

“It hurt a lot. I broke my arm, I think. I knew Mother would be furious, so I healed it with my hair and didn’t tell her about it. It was the first time I hid something from her. I felt guilty about it for a long time.”

 

Flynn shook her head. “How about you?” Rapunzel asked. “What’s the silliest thing you’ve ever done?”

 

Flynn didn’t say anything. “Sorry,” Rapunzel said. “I know you don’t do back-stories.”

 

Flynn shrugged, bare toes curling, bringing the arch of her feet marginally closer to the fire. The heat had brought a flush out on her cheeks; under the glow, her hair looked red.

 

Looking at her, Rapunzel was startled to realize that Flynn was pretty. Not like Mother. She was… sharper, somehow. Busier. Like prisms inside shards of glass, hair changing with every movement of the wind. Like fire. Like leaves? Rapunzel lacked the vocabulary to describe it. She wanted to run her fingers through it, to see if the razor-fineness of it cut the skin or was just an illusion – if it would give instead, soft like the feathers of the sparrows that had come to her windowsill in the tower.

 

Flynn spoke, sudden enough to make Rapunzel start. “Probably the time I stole a pendant from that cart during the cinnamon festival. It was this cheap little thing – it looked like an emerald, but the stone was glass. The vendor boarded his cart up at night and kept a dog by it. I don’t know what I was thinking. I could’ve gotten it during the day with a lot less fuss, but I got cocky.”

 

“Why did you steal it if it wasn’t worth anything?”

 

“One of the girls at the orphanage had lost one like it the week before. The only thing she had left from her parents. I thought it’d make her happy. The dog ended up waking up halfway through. I still have the bite mark on my calf.”

 

“Did she like it?”

 

“Once she found out I stole it, she threw a potato at me and called me a thief, then burst into tears.” Flynn shrugged. “I don’t know if she kept it. I never asked. It was just a stupid little thing. The metal was already tarnished when I took it.”

 

Rapunzel didn’t say anything. “I told you it was stupid,” Flynn said.

 

“No,” Rapunzel said, and something loosened in her chest. The effect of the stars, maybe, or the warmth of the fire. “I don’t think it’s stupid at all.”

 

“I had a bruise the size of a potato on my face,” Flynn said. “I told everyone I got hit by the butcher’s wife.”

 

“That’s less embarrassing?”

 

“It is if you’ve seen the butcher’s wife.”

 

 

~^~

 

 

“A gift like that… it needs to be protected. That’s why Mother never let me… That’s why I never left the tower.”

 

Pascal settled into the curve of her ankle. Rapunzel tried to feel out the nature of Flynn’s silence, but Flynn’s expression wasn’t telling. She wondered what she even expected Flynn to say. _‘That makes sense’?_ Or ‘ _I think so too’?_

Flynn said, “Well, when you outline it in those terms, it’s not really a gift.”

 

Rapunzel blinked. “What do you mean?”

 

“Gifts are things you give to other people, right? You squirrel yourself away in the tower, never using it for anybody except your mother… that’s a curse, not a gift.”

 

She wasn’t sure what to say. “I mean, look at it this way,” Flynn said. “You step out… yeah, sure. Someone might eventually cut it. But who do you help in the meantime? Dozens? Hundreds? I don’t know. The only time I gave a gift, I got a potato thrown into my face. I’m not exactly the voice of experience.”

 

Rapunzel spoke a little unsteadily. “You’ve given me gifts.”

 

“You’re going back anyway? Despite all this?”

 

She could feel Pascal stir at her feet, regarding her with his chameleon gaze. She couldn’t look at back him.

 

“Seems like a waste,” Flynn said.

 

 

~^~

 

 

“You know,” Flynn said a couple hours later, somewhere on the other side of the fire, “if you kept that splinter from earlier, we could always use _that_ to spear some fish for dinner.”

 

“Stop talking,” Rapunzel said, and closed her eyes to sleep.

 

 

 


	5. hear my being dance

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Music, bells, glass.

**_5\. hear my being dance_ ** ****

**_\- - -_ **

 

 

Flynn quickly proved to be terrible with horses, but to be fair, Maximus didn’t seem to be an average horse. He seemed like a bloodthirsty warmonger who just happened to be in the shape of a horse. He was… terrifying, but he’d gentled under Rapunzel’s touch and unexpectedly, she’d fallen in love. Why not, she’d thought, feeling all reason leave her anyway when she saw the city bloom up over the hill, resplendent in gold. A thief, a runaway, a chameleon, and a warhorse. _I made it, Mother._ “You know,” Flynn said, examining a ‘Wanted’ poster of herself, “they always overemphasize my lips. These look like duck lips. And when the hell would I have the coin to rouge up my cheeks?”

“Maybe they’re trying to pretty you up so men won’t want to kill you,” Rapunzel suggested. “You’re wanted more alive, right?”

 

“This is going to give people the wrong idea,” Flynn said, unconvinced.

 

“What’s the right idea?”

 

“… you’re missing the point.”

 

“Come on,” she said. The sounds of the city were just beyond the bridge. Excitement was quickly driving the patience from her and – but there was business to attend to first. When Flynn was distracted by grousing at yet another poster stuck on the front gate, Rapunzel took the opportunity to hide the satchel a little more securely under Maximus’s saddle.

 

Maximus turned his head to knicker questioningly at her. Rapunzel patted his neck and rested her forehead on his nose a moment, taking everything in peripherally. Her heart was thundering so loud she would have been surprised if the horse wasn’t hearing it. “I don’t want this to end,” she whispered. “Right now, right here. This is okay.”

 

Maximus whuffed. Pascal nuzzled her neck. It really was okay. Just seeing the city, being here amid all the bustle and the explosively colorful streets, she could go home happy. Too much might break the spell. She’d paint her experiences on the wall behind the curtain, replace the portrait of her watching the lights, and she and Mother would get along as they always had, and…

 

… was that music?

 

 

~^~

“How do you even know how to dance, anyway?” Flynn griped, staggering as Rapunzel spun her around. “Did you have magical spirit dance instructors hidden in your hair too?”

 

“You’re overthinking it,” Rapunzel laughed. The fiddles and the laughter and the clapping made a wall of sound. Rapunzel could hear children squealing with delight, trailing streamers behind them wherever they ran. The air was thick with purple and gold and silver confetti and the blur of a hundred people dancing in time.

 

The rhythm and the feel of the cool stone beneath her bare feet were setting a fire in her again. This time she didn’t bother to suppress it. She let go of Flynn and let herself be swept up in the storm of sound and colors, spinning and spinning until the faces around her smeared and her hair flew and her skirts soared around her and _this,_ this was the city, this was the source of the lanterns and everything that was west in her heart. _Lights_ , she thought dizzily. Lights and lights and more lights. _Are you proud of me, Mother?_

 

Flynn was lingering at the sidelines, looking as if she expected one of the dancers to assault her.

 

Rapunzel dashed back out and snagged her hand. “Oh, right, sure,” Flynn said. “Why stop at just one humiliation? Let me take off my pants, wait.”

 

“Think with your feet, okay?” Rapunzel grabbed her other hand and lifted it above her head, trying to spin her around. Flynn was taller and the result was awkward, but after a moment Flynn got the hint and turned, nearly knocking their heads together. “Dance,” Rapunzel said.

 

Flynn tripped instead. Her nose came dangerously close to mashing against Rapunzel’s.

 

Rapunzel pulled away a bit and repeated, “ _Dance,_ ” and Flynn reluctantly moved her feet, kicking at the cobblestones with her boots. The crowd Rapunzel had drawn together was whirling around them, the lines of dancers ebbing and flowing into flower shapes, into squares, into suns.

 

She’d thought she’d maybe had enough at the gate, but now, surrounded by the people and their laughter, she realized that what she’d been mistaking for contentment had been caution. Looking at Flynn, everything she wanted suddenly lined up with brilliant, dizzying clarity.

 

Flynn tripped over a lady’s skirt. Rapunzel moved back the other way to give them some room. “Here _,_ ” Rapunzel said, and swung Flynn around.

 

Again the clumsy stagger. Not that Flynn was particularly graceful, but she was nimble and that should have counted for something, right? Strength that would bend to pressure only to whip back twice as hard. But dancing, dancing was easy. Dancing…

 

It was a ruse, Rapunzel realized, swinging her around again. Of course. That was the way Flynn was. Once Rapunzel called her on it, she’d drop the act, and the real dancing would begin.

 

Rapunzel decided to act surprised when it happened. Maybe slap her shoulder and laugh. Flynn would take Rapunzel’s hand and snap her out into a sharp, brisk spin like the couple to their right – maybe dip her down to the ground like the couple on their left. And Rapunzel would…

 

Well. That was hazier, because Mother had inked out most of the pages that involved that in her bedtime story book. What she’d left still had the echo of grandness in them. Dances, ballrooms, girls like her (or maybe not so much like her, because she wasn’t elegant or beautiful and _don’t pout, flower, it’s unbecoming_ ) being swept off their feet.

 

Flynn could do that much. Sweep her off her feet. She had that way about her, and Rapunzel suddenly very much wanted to be swept off her feet by Flynn, almost as much as she wanted to see the lights.

 

She looked up at her, smiling, about to speak, but Flynn wasn’t even looking at her. Flynn’s face was crimson, her mouth set in a razor-thin line.

 

The playfulness in her disappeared. Rapunzel brought them to a stop amid the flurry of other dancers. Flynn’s shoulder was tense under her hand.

 

After a moment Rapunzel said tentatively, “Flynn?”

 

Flynn’s gaze drifted, looking out somewhere past Rapunzel’s head. When she spoke, her voice was quiet and a little rough. “Not good at dancing, Blondie.”

 

“That’s okay.” Guilt made her stomach clench. She forced a smile and took Flynn’s hand, ignoring the way the others glanced at them, the way the crowd seemed to part for them, just a bit. “Let’s go and do something you are good at, then.”

 

 

~^~

 

“Okay, well,” Flynn said to the air, her back to Rapunzel. “I can think of about twenty different reasons why this isn’t a good idea either. And over the last twenty-four hours, I’ve become an expert at recognizing bad ideas.”

 

“Shh.” The scarf was purple and gold, the symbol of the city embroidered at each end. The man selling them had given it to her for free, blushing furiously when she’d complimented him on the beautiful arrangement, and also his cart was lovely, and she bet his daughters loved his artwork and weren’t they so proud of their father? “I’m trying to concentrate.”

 

“You’re doing it wrong anyway,” Flynn said, shifting her weight. The scarf dangled from her belt like a colorful tail. “Why are you tiptoeing? Why are you asking me for tips on how to be a thief? You practically stole this already.”

 

“What? I didn’t steal it!”

 

Even from the back, she knew Flynn’s expression was exasperated. All in all she’d seemed to have regained her equilibrium, but irritation seemed to have a calming effect on Flynn in general. “Do you know me or something?” Flynn asked.

 

“What?”

 

“Because you’re also coming straight at me. Any reason you’re acting like you know me? It’s a little suspicious, if I want to be honest. Maybe kind of threatening. Who knows. Maybe the palace guard’s around and can help protect me from your thieving ways.”

 

“You don’t have to make fun of me,” Rapunzel said, a bit stiffly. She walked back to the start. The alley between the shops was spacious and dusty, littered with empty crates and discarded streamers.

 

She turned resolutely and started toward Flynn again, this time meandering, looking down at an empty crate, down at a half-eaten apple in the dust.

 

Flynn was examining her fingernails, looking bored with the entire situation.

 

 _Well._ Let her take it lightly. Her bare feet were working to her advantage as well, Rapunzel realized as she drew near. She was as light as a spell. She could take the air itself if she wanted. 

 

Closing the distance, Rapunzel brushed up beside her and casually stretched her fingers out.

 

They missed by maybe a hairsbreadth. Flynn had lifted up onto her toes to stretch.

 

Rapunzel reached out again. This time they missed by more: Flynn had unexpectedly twisted down to tie her boot. The scarf fluttered with the movement.

 

Rapunzel made an impatient grab for it, only to knock against Flynn’s wrist as Flynn rocked her arms back, seemingly working out a kink in her shoulders.

 

Out of patience, Rapunzel lunged, and then she was stumbling past Flynn, skirts flaring above her head.

 

Flynn was laughing.

 

“It’s not funny,” Rapunzel said, bullying her skirts back down, but she was smiling. She’d never seen Flynn laugh before. She snagged the scarf out of Flynn’s belt and tied it around her own waist. “Fine. If you’re such a master, show me. Give me a demonstration.”

 

“What, a scarf? That’d be too easy.”

 

Rapunzel rolled her eyes. “You really think so little of me?” Flynn asked.

 

“I just don’t see how—”

 

“Wait here,” Flynn said, and walked out of the alley.

 

She returned a few minutes later, a set of bells jangling in her hand. “Um,” Rapunzel said. “Where did you get…”

 

“Around.”

 

“But those look like the ones the shopkeepers hang over their—”

 

“You’re imagining things. Turn around.”

 

“This doesn’t prove anything,” Rapunzel said.

 

“That’s because it wasn’t the test. Turn around.”

 

Rapunzel reluctantly did as instructed. Flynn stuffed the bells into the scarf. “We’re not going to keep them, right?” she asked the wall.

 

Flynn didn’t respond. Sighing, Rapunzel pressed her lips together and listened. 

 

She expected to hear scuffling at least. Flynn had already demonstrated in the woods that she could move quietly, but Rapunzel’s hearing was excellent, and anyway boots made a lot of noise on this much grit.

 

She waited. Her legs protested, alerting her to how tense she was. She relaxed, shifting her weight, hearing the muted clink of the bells as she moved. She counted to ten, then to twenty, to thirty.

 

After a count of three minutes, she glanced over her shoulder to ask what was taking Flynn so long.

 

There was no one there.

 

Alarmed, Rapunzel spun around. A quick sweep of the fruit crates and empty sacks turned up nothing. She jogged forward a few steps and skidded to a halt. Had she…? No. But maybe. Streets? Maybe she’d dropped something earlier? No, she would have told Rapunzel, would have stopped the game or…

 

Rapunzel started forward and stopped again, breath quickening in escalating panic. Never mind the game. Without Flynn she had no idea how to get back to the tower. She’d starve, she’d get attacked by ruffians who would steal her hair, steal her hair and demand horrible things, and Mother would be so furious if she came back bald and she’d never, she’d never—

 

A muted thump from behind her had her whirling again, but there was nothing except the stack of crates.

 

She backed up a few steps, then turned to start running.

 

She felt the faintest hint of a breeze brush her, and then she being pushed back against the wall. Flynn was frowning. “Flynn,” she gasped.

 

“Hi,” Flynn said. “What are you doing?”

 

Her heartbeat felt like a flutter in her throat. “You weren’t paying any attention whatsoever,” Flynn said. “A toddler could’ve nabbed those bells.”

 

“I…” She swallowed. “But where did you…”

 

“Go? On the roof, of course. And then I dropped down behind you. You really think I would have tried to steal these from you with the sun at my back?”

 

Flynn dangled the bells in front of her. Rapunzel’s hand shot down to her empty scarf reflexively. Fuming, she reached up and snatched them. Flynn was laughing. “It’s not funny,” Rapunzel said. Her voice was still unsteady. “You disappeared, and I thought…”

 

“Oh, come on, really? Why would I bring you all the way to the city just to dump you off while I’m trying to show off? I have my professional pride, you know.”

 

Bells in hand, Rapunzel didn’t know whether to laugh or hit her. At Flynn’s continued grin, however, she felt something in her give, and she said, “I hate you.”

 

“Oh, I’ll bet,” Flynn said. And then, before Rapunzel could say anything else, Flynn untied the scarf from her waist, shook out the wrinkles, and draped it around Rapunzel’s neck. She fluffed out the edges, taking care to display the sun design, and very suddenly there was no spite left in Rapunzel at all. “Now where to?”

 

“I want you to show me the city,” Rapunzel said. “Wherever you want to go. I want to see it.”

 

“That’ll take a while.”

 

Yes, Rapunzel thought. The angle of the sun was throwing half of Flynn’s face into shadow. Before Rapunzel could think, before she thought to stop herself, before she thought _this is a bad idea,_ she stood on tiptoe and planted a kiss on the sunlit cheek, just to be sure.

 

When she pulled back, Flynn’s face was a little pink, but that could have been from anything. “You didn’t have to bribe me.”

 

Rapunzel gently closed her fist around the bells, left the alley, and made her way down the street.

 

Four shops down, a shopkeeper was outside, looking agitated, scanning the ground. There was dust on his hands and knees.

 

Rapunzel approached him and held out her hand. “Are these yours?”

 

He turned to her and saw what she held. “ _Yes_ ,” he said, looking relieved. “I figured some brat took off with them. I appreciate it, you bringing them back.”

 

“It was my pleasure.” And she helped him hang them up where they belonged, right over his door.

 

“You’re a lousy thief,” Flynn said when she returned.

 

“You’re a lousy teacher,” Rapunzel said. “Let’s go. We have a lot to see before tonight.”

 

 

~^~

 

 

Flynn said something.

 

“What?” Rapunzel said.

 

“I said I’ve stolen from this place.”

 

“Really? From _this_ one?”

 

“Glass is worth a lot. Glass figurines are worth a lot more.”

 

Rapunzel stared at her. “What?” Flynn said. “I’m a thief. This is not news to you.”

 

“Yes, but I didn’t think…” She wasn’t sure what she’d thought. Rapunzel grabbed her arm and tugged her away from the storefront. “Let’s go to that one, then, over there. The one with all the food in it.”

 

Flynn planted her feet. Rapunzel stopped. “You mean you’ve stolen from that one too?”

 

“Yeah,” Flynn said, and squinted around some more. She was sweating. “And… that one. And that one over there. And that one has my poster up on it. And—where are you dragging me.”

 

“To go buy you a hat,” Rapunzel said grimly.

 

 

~^~

 

 

“I can’t eat that,” Flynn said, somewhere underneath the drooping brown brim. “It’ll make me fat.”

 

“You’re not fat,” Rapunzel said. “And stop saying ‘no’ to everything. You’re supposed to be my guide.”

 

“If I get too fat then I can’t wriggle in through windows,” Flynn said. “And then I’ll have to starve in order to eat again, and the whole thing will be ironic.”

 

“Live an honest life and there’ll be no problem,” Rapunzel said, and without further ado shoved the end of the pastry twist into Flynn’s mouth. Flynn gagged. “Isn’t it delicious?” Rapunzel pressed, enthused. “I’ve never tasted anything like it. I have to try to make this at home. Do you know what kind of nuts are on this? I don’t recognize them. Mother never brought them home for me. Maybe we can buy them in the market. Do you think there’s a place we can buy them in the market?”

 

“Fmmrmmf,” Flynn said, and looked mildly murderous.

 

“Do you think we can get other things?” Rapunzel was already twisting herself around. If only things would stop smelling so _good._ “There’s someone else selling pastries at the corner. And another, he said he puts vegetables inside a little pie crust. That you can just carry with you! Can you imagine?”

 

Flynn removed the twist from her mouth, swallowed her mouthful, and said, “Sure. They make meat ones too.”

 

 _That_ sounded revolting, but she didn’t let it diminish her enthusiasm. “And can we visit the booth that sold those hard candies?”

 

“Sure.”

 

“Okay!” She tugged on Flynn’s hand. “Let’s go!”

 

“Where?”

 

“Everywhere! To all of them!”

 

“Blondie.”

 

“Yes?”

 

“You want the rest of this?”

 

“Well, okay, but only if you don’t want—”

 

“Good,” Flynn said, and then mashed the pastry, nuts and dripping icing and all, against Rapunzel’s forehead, right between the eyes.

 

 

~^~

 

 

“Is there any reason you have to befriend everything with a pulse?”

 

“Shush,” Rapunzel said, and to the little girl said, “I have an idea. Let’s share. I’ll put some in your hair, and you put some in mine. Deal?”

 

The little girl’s smile was shy. Together they split apart the bunch of flowers she’d offered to Rapunzel, then took turns burying the stems in each other’s hair. Rapunzel chose the prettiest – a large daisy – and tucked it carefully behind the girl’s ear. “There,” Rapunzel said, grinning at her. “Now we’re flower sisters.”

 

The girl nodded. Rapunzel flicked her nose, coaxing another gap-toothed smile from her, and without another word the girl turned tail and ran. She joined up with her sisters a ways down the street, and the group of them giggled as they scampered away.

 

“Kill me,” Flynn said.

 

Rapunzel straightened, patting the flowers to make sure they’d stay, and grabbed Flynn’s hand before suicide could occur. “I have a better idea.”

 

 

~^~

 

 

“Well,” Flynn said. “As far as punishments go, this one is both inventive and traumatizing.”

 

“It’s not a punishment.” Every time she looked there were clouds of blue fabric and Flynn’s bare shoulders. The dress was a little short, a little big in the waist, and the shopkeeper was looking extremely concerned, eyeing the exits in the area and looking like she was trying to gauge how fast Flynn could run in skirts. “You look…”

 

Flynn watched her. “I did mention I’m a woman, right?”

 

“Yes, but…”

 

“So why are you so surprised?”

 

“I just…” The breeze caught the skirts and ruffled them, exposing Flynn’s ankle for a second. It was a little hairy, and strangely, this helped restore Rapunzel’s voice. “You look beautiful.”

 

“Well, thank god I can do something right as a woman,” Flynn said. “My entire existence has finally been validated. Now if only I could cook. Can I take this off now?”

 

“Nope,” she said. She realized she was smiling. “You have to curtsy first. That was the deal.”

 

“You know, I don’t remember the conditions being exactly fair in ‘the deal’,” Flynn said. “In fact, I’m pretty sure I’m not getting anything out of ‘the deal’ at all. How did that happen again?”

 

“Curtsy and you can take it off. I promise.”

 

“Sorry. I don’t do curtsies.”

 

“But you just said you used to wear dresses.”

 

“It was a lie.”

 

“No it wasn’t.” Rapunzel smiled brilliantly at her, the way she knew by now could be counted on to make Flynn roll her eyes. “I’m a lady. It’s the right thing to do in my presence.”

 

“Oh, ho,” Flynn said. “You’re out of luck. It’s been ages.”

 

“It’s easy. Here, I’ll show you.” Rapunzel drew a deep, deliberate curtsy –hands on her skirts, bringing them up sideways, right foot behind the left, knees dipping.

 

“Oh, lord,” Flynn said.

 

“Come on. Try it.”

 

She did it again, even slower this time. Flynn lifted her eyes heavenward, closed them as if shielding herself from the glare, then grabbed her skirts. She lifted them up, placed one foot behind the other, and bent her knees.

 

Then her toe caught on her heel and she overbalanced, and without much ceremony she was on the ground.

 

Dust flew up, accompanied by the startled squawking of nearby chickens.

 

She couldn’t help it; Rapunzel burst out laughing. The vendor was fretful, saying _please be careful_ and _are you sure I can’t interest you in a pair of trousers._ “I’m going to kill you,” Flynn said, but the effect was ruined by the dirt on her face.

 

“Oh, don’t worry,” Rapunzel said, still gasping for breath, tears in her eyes, “I think I might be dying already.”

 

 

~^~

 

While Flynn was off negotiating the price for a package of street chalk with the vendor, Rapunzel took a moment to explore the area by herself.

 

The street was flooded with movement and colors so fantastic they hurt her eyes. Flynn had said it wasn’t always like this, that this was the summer’s biggest festival, and wasn’t she lucky she was visiting when the town was in full bloom?

 

She walked slowly, taking everything in. Up one side, by the flower girls and the bread carts and the woman selling scented scarves, down the other side to the vendor who was selling miniature watercolor paintings set on ivory discs. (“I can paint your portrait for a discount, sweetie,” the vendor said when he caught her eyeing the paints. “Though I might have to charge you extra to include all that hair.”) On to the man selling bangles, to the woman selling beads, to the woman selling perfumes, to the man selling lace.

 

She didn’t hear the group of men talking until she was nearly on top of them. Engaged in a discussion with the vendor selling miniature clay figurines, she only turned her attention to them when she overheard one of them say, “… lack of the belt if you ask me. If it were my girl, I would have whipped some sense into her before letting her go out like that.”

 

“It’s not the same. My day, a girl knew how to dress proper.”

 

“Tempting the lads. I’ve seen it before.”

 

“Miss?” the vendor asked Rapunzel.

 

Rapunzel blinked herself back to attention. She complimented the vendor a final time, excused herself politely, then drifted closer to the three men.

 

They were all looking off in the same direction. Rapunzel came a bit closer, then craned her neck to follow their gazes.

 

Flynn was still negotiating with the chalk vendor, gesturing emphatically with a coin pinched between her thumb and forefinger. The vendor had her hands on her hips, looking like she was fighting a smile.

 

“Saw her with a horse earlier. Doesn’t ride side saddle dressed like that, either, I can guarantee you that.”

 

“She’ll get hers,” the man on the right said grimly. “Disease always brings ‘em down. Seen it a hundred times.”

 

The vendor shook her head, and Flynn laughed.

 

And then something shifted in Rapunzel’s gaze, and for the first time she saw Flynn as others might see her. Tight trousers and boots – not the skirts the other women in the city wore. Messy hair, cut short like a man’s. Shirt open at the neck, chest bound by the vest. The weapon at her side, when most here went unarmed.

 

“Either that or the jealousy, and you’ve seen it before, where the men—”

 

“Stop it.”

 

The men turned to her, surprised. Rapunzel hadn’t realized she’d spoken out loud. Her heartbeat sounded loud in her ears. Her hands hurt, and she realized belatedly that she’d balled them into fists. “You’re being cruel,” she said.

 

The men looked at each other. One started to respond, but Rapunzel was already walking away, barely feeling herself move, barely seeing where she was going. She ran into a woman and heard herself apologize, then barked her hip off a cart so hard she nearly fell. She straightened and walked faster, not stopping until she could see the water, until she felt the damp slats of the docks under her feet, until she couldn’t go any farther.

 

She fetched up against a post and leaned there for a long time, listening to the lake slosh underneath the deck.

 

By the time she understood what it all meant, all of it, she was dry-eyed and Flynn was calling to her from the gate. She turned, briskly sliding the back of her hand over her nose. Flynn was jogging towards her, grinning, waving the chalk over her head.

 

When Flynn brought the boat around that evening, Rapunzel had Pascal distract her while she slid the satchel under her seat.

 

 

 


	6. shaking keeps me steady

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lights, drowning, breathing.

**_6\. shaking keeps me steady_ ** ****

**_\- - -_ **

 

Since arriving in town she’d danced in the town square and eaten something so sweet it had made some strange place below her ears ache and had touched a hundred different textures she had no words for. She’d sprawled on the floor of the library with Flynn, looking over charts mapping territories so vast it made her dizzy. Hundreds and thousands of cities, _continents,_ water deep enough between them to drown ships, drown mountains.

 

It was her first time out in a boat, but it didn’t affect her as much as it probably would have a day ago. The fact that she couldn’t swim seemed to be an endless source of amusement for Flynn. “Don’t fall in if it worries you,” Flynn said. “But I’ll save you if you ask nicely.”

 

“If I fall in, I’m taking you with me,” Rapunzel retorted. The muscles in Flynn’s upper arms jumped as she pulled the oars, taking them into water peppered with the reflection of stars. Pascal was sitting on the curve of the helm like a tiny green lieutenant. “So don’t get any funny ideas.”

 

“Like I said, Blondie, after all that fuss? You’re seeing these damn lights if I have to hold your eyes open.”

 

“You’d have to save me first,” Rapunzel said, feeling giddy. Her hands kept burrowing into her dress, bunching the fabric.

 

Flynn moved the oars smoothly through the water, barely splashing. She contrived to look distantly amused whenever Rapunzel talked to her, like an aunt indulging an excited child, but her own eyes kept scanning the sky. For her part, Rapunzel began to wonder if the feeling in her stomach was closer to excitement or anxiety.

 

She figured it out when Flynn’s oar accidentally knocked against the side of the boat, nearly making her jump out of her skin. “You all right?” Flynn asked, not breaking stride.

 

“Yes.” She could barely get the word out. “Flynn?”

 

“Yeah?”

 

She couldn’t remember what she’d planned to say. She tried picturing where they’d come from. How they’d soar. How many. Maybe there was a special place where they released them. Maybe something would go wrong this year, and they’d end up not releasing them at all. Maybe they’d given up on the lost princess.

 

“You know, it’s really kind of a twist of fate you got to see the lights every year at all.”

 

Rapunzel had been staring at the ripples made by the oars, absorbed. At Flynn’s voice she looked up. “What?”

 

“The lights,” Flynn said patiently. “I’ve been thinking about that. The only reason you wanted to leave your tower in the first place was because you wanted to see your lights and your mother wouldn’t let you, right? Otherwise, I mean, who knows how long you would’ve sat in there.”

 

Not too much longer, maybe. The lights had been the main incentive, but the itch had been growing in her for years now. But Rapunzel nodded. 

 

“The whole reason Gothel built that tower was so she could hide you away from civilization. But she just happened to build it northeast of the city. Which, by the way? Is impressive. Seriously, one woman, building that thing? Either she got an army of dwarves to help her or she’s stronger than a team of oxen. Has she considered further business ventures?”

 

“I don’t understand,” Rapunzel interrupted. “What are you talking about, ‘northeast’?”

 

“What I’m saying is,” Flynn said, “is that the winds tend to travel from southwest to northeast. If she’d built that tower anywhere else, you might’ve never even known they existed. I mean, you might have still seen some of them, who knows. But where you were, the winds took them right to you, every year.”

 

Rapunzel stared at her. Flynn shrugged. “I’m not one for destiny or anything,” Flynn said, “but if I was, it’d look pretty close.”

 

 _Mother._ Now that the pinnacle of her trip was almost here, the dread she felt for her imminent return nearly rivaled her anticipation for the show. “What if this isn’t what I need it to be?” she said, almost to herself. “What if the moment I’ve dreamed about my whole life doesn’t measure up to what it is in my head?”

 

“That’swhat you’re worried about? Since when did you get so picky? You got to the city alive, you ate today, and you’ve got a front-row seat. You don’t think that’s good enough?”

 

“I need this to be great,” she whispered.

 

Apparently satisfied with how far they were, Flynn pulled up the oars, let them drip a little into the water, before pulling them in entirely. “Close your eyes then,” Flynn said. “But if you ask me, no matter how disappointing the end is, it’s still better to finish the story. That way you can get started on a new one.”

 

Rapunzel thought about arguing, but it made too much sense. The day’s events had knocked a lot of the words she normally had out of her anyway. As the afternoon had worn on, she’d found herself talking less and listening more, because she sensed that worlds weren’t meant to be redefined this rapidly. The city was full of people so accustomed to variety that variety had become mundane to them.

 

Something inside her—the same something that had pushed her out her tower window in the first place – knew that even if she returned to the city herself one day, she’d never be able to really integrate herself the way she wanted. Life was full of tower windows, and this one had been barred off before she’d even been born.

 

There weren’t words enough to explain it, let alone to Flynn, so she kept what words she had left to herself.

 

Then the first wave of lanterns started drifting up from the city, and Rapunzel had no more words left for anything.

 

 

~^~

 

 

“Not bad,” Flynn said, when the flow started to taper off. “Much better view from out here than it is from inside a jail cell, that’s for sure.”

 

Rapunzel’s face was wet. Flynn had given her a handkerchief halfway through, apparently one of three she’d picked up at the city for this exact purpose. Rapunzel had used it until she’d turned around and saw Flynn holding two lanterns of her own, looking sheepish but also maybe a little proud, and then wiping away tears had been the last thing on Rapunzel’s mind.

 

The lake was like glass and the lanterns bobbed around them like a thousand tiny suns, and now Rapunzel found herself looking at Flynn instead. Flynn exuded boredom, back against the bow, sprawled casually over the seat, but her eyes were riveted to the glow.

 

Later Rapunzel couldn’t recall exactly when it was that she decided. It came somewhere between the realization that _yes, this is everything I want_ and the realization that she’d had back at the kingdom gate – _no, there are still other things I want._ There was no one to tell her she was being selfish, no one to tell her to stop wanting.

 

She slid the satchel out from under the seat.

 

It took Flynn several minutes to notice. Eventually she lowered her eyes, opening her mouth to say something, then shut it as soon as she saw the satchel. She sat up slowly, moving her legs in closer to her body, like Rapunzel was a horse she was trying not to spook.

 

“I’m sorry,” Rapunzel said, after neither of them had spoken for a time. “I was scared.”

 

Flynn didn’t say anything. She didn’t look angry, but she wasn’t smiling, either.

 

“I was scared and… to be honest, I’m… I’m still a little scared, but I know that you’re scared too, even if you don’t say you are, so…”

 

Flynn didn’t move. The lights kept flickering off the buckles on her vest, making them blink.

 

“I know I should’ve given it to you earlier, but I couldn’t, I thought that maybe…” _Stop talking._ Rapunzel couldn’t help it. This was ruin and maybe gain and she was too out of her depth to know which one was coming. She thrust the satchel forward before she could change her mind.

 

Flynn didn’t move to take it. “What did I tell you about trusting thieves?” she asked.

 

“Don’t do it.”

 

“You never listen to me.”

 

Rapunzel didn’t have a lot of breath to work with. “I’m sorry.”

 

Flynn’s eyes were amber under the light of the lanterns, narrow and lidded like a cat’s. She reached out for the satchel, fingertips tracing the stitching along the top of the flap.

 

Rapunzel waited for her to take it. Instead, at last, Flynn flattened her palm and pushed down until the satchel was on the floor of the boat. Then Flynn’s fingers found the soft hollow under Rapunzel’s chin.

 

Flynn said, resignedly, “Well, this probably isn’t the best idea I’ve ever had.”

 

Her voice was barely above a breath. “Why?”

 

“You know why.”

 

“No.” She really didn’t, and suddenly, she was desperate to. “Tell me.”

 

“You think the worst people can do is talk?”

 

“What?” But with a sinking feeling, she realized Flynn had caught her exchange with the men after all. “Why should it matter?”

 

“You should have the chance to do things right.”

 

She didn’t know what to do. She kissed her mother good morning and good night every day on the cheek, so she knew what lips were for. _Put it from your mind, darling flower,_ Mother had said, whenever Rapunzel had brought up the subject. _You and someone else? The whole idea is demented. Besides, the man’s fangs will pierce your cheek and your hazelnut soup will dribble into your lap, and then where will you be? Starving, that’s where._

 

Flynn looked vulnerable. And angry, and worried. And Rapunzel wasn’t sure what she wanted anymore, but her body knew what it needed, just like it had in the forest and in the town square. _Dance._ Dance, and touch. “So you would’ve just taken anyone who came to your tower, huh?” Flynn said, but her voice cracked under the bravado.

 

The pulse in her neck was beating against the pressure of Flynn’s thumb. Flynn’s eyes flickered, acknowledging the closing distance, but she made no other move when Rapunzel lifted her own hand, took Flynn’s chin, tilted her face upwards, and kissed her on the cheek.

 

She held it there longer than she did with her mother. She closed her eyes, feeling the glow fade into the background. Flynn’s skin was warm under her lips.

 

She felt something quaking – her, maybe? No, she was steady. She pulled away, looking at Flynn’s face, and realized what it was.

 

Flynn was laughing.

 

Surprised, Rapunzel pulled back a bit further to watch her. Flynn’s eyes were squeezed shut. When they opened again, they were alight with the reflection of the sky and the water and the lanterns and, absurdly, Rapunzel wondered what magic Flynn had, to make her glow so brightly when she wasn’t even singing. “Thank you,” Flynn said sincerely, and then she took Rapunzel’s chin and tilted her face up and then _she_ closed the distance.

 

Rapunzel thought, as their lips met, oh.She parted them instinctively, then closed them again. She didn’t know if she was supposed to breathe – nose? Mouth? Her mouth was… and then Flynn shifted position and suddenly it was no longer awkward. It was instinct and heat and pressure in the right places and Rapunzel’s senses were assaulted all at once. Flynn’s scent – leather, metal. The warmth in front of her and the chill on her back. Taste – sweet? Like the tarts they’d gotten earlier – peripheral sounds, water against their boat and the music from the city floating over the water towards them and—

 

And then Flynn made a humming noise in the back of her throat, and Rapunzel thought, _oh._ For a moment there didn’t seem to be enough space between them to breathe, and then Flynn’s thumb was sliding over her collarbone, skating over the fabric of her dress, and everything suddenly came together and there was far, far too much space.

 

Rapunzel pressed in closer and her own fingers were exploring, seeing by touch, fingertips nosing up against the metal fastenings and the tough material of the vest and the threadbare shirt and up to Flynn’s hair, and it _was_ soft like feathers, soft like lips and soft like the muted rocking of the boat.

 

Flynn’s hand was on her hip. Rapunzel tilted her head back, letting her lids fall until her eyes were nearly closed, and watched through her eyelashes as the lanterns lazily drifted further north, towards home.

 

 

~^~

 

Ten minutes later the world would come apart again. Flynn would dock the boat and run off with the satchel under the pretense of taking care of business. Two men would saunter out of the gloom while Rapunzel waited in the boat, and Rapunzel would scream for Flynn, only for her mother to come instead, saying _I told you so_ and _Mother knows best_ and _it’s safe at the tower, Flower, you can always trust your mother._ And she’d cry and do as she was commanded, because why had she ever done otherwise, it had all been so stupid and her mother was so sensible.

 

Right now – right now, Rapunzel closed her eyes and held on to Flynn and thought, _touch._

 

 

 


	7. which are you

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> (which are you?)

**_which are you_ ** ****

**_\- - -_ **

 

Her mother had taken out her hair flower by flower, unraveling the vines, letting the mass drop foot by foot to the floor. Rapunzel had nearly overbalanced twice going up the stairs to her room, jerking her head forward too hard to compensate for a weight no longer as dead.

 

Mother had said, an echo of cool disapproval in her tone, _I’ll make dinner today, Rapunzel. You sit up there and think about what you did._

Pascal was a comforting weight on her stomach. On her bed, Rapunzel stared up at the ceiling and thought about what she’d done. Her legs were still sore and scratched from a shortcut through brambles. Her hand hurt from clutching the scarf into a ball in her fist.

 

… she needed to paint.

 

 

~^~

 

Smells were starting to waft up from downstairs –bread, pie crust, soup.

 

Rapunzel sat on the floor, panting, containers strewn around her, paint chest upended. Pascal was perched on the canopy over the bed, looking down at her with nervous, questing flicks of his tongue.

 

Under the circumstances, Rapunzel thought she deserved to throw something, but most of the containers were homemade and would shatter against the wall. She could hurl her mirror to the floor, but then she’d have to clean that up too.

 

She ended up throwing the scarf, but it only snagged in the air and fluttered back down to her feet. Then she picked it up and hid it under her pillow, and then spent the next fifteen minutes gathering her paints back up, setting the chest upright, stacking the containers back inside neatly.

 

Then she flopped down onto her bed and screamed into her pillow, kicking her covers, ripping at hair that refused to yield, that could never be pulled out by the roots no matter how hard she or anyone else yanked. She could cut it, couldn’t she, she could use her chopping knife downstairs and sneak it up past Mother and saw away at it until the sunlight fell away and she was left with hair as brown as Flynn’s _and now she was sick, she felt sick._

 

She swung herself from her bed again.

 

 

~^~

 

She reviewed the scene again and again, at different angles and from different heights and in different colors. Flynn’s back steadily getting further away. The tight belly of the sails as they pulled the boat towards the city.

 

Then she thought about the way she’d scratched and bit at the two men, enough to make Mother regard her with alarm after it was over. For a moment, looking back at her, Rapunzel had thought how easy it would be to walk away. To stand the men back up again and deliver a knee to their stomachs and drive her fist into their necks and wrap her hair around them and squeeze and squeeze and show her mother that she could take care of herself after all, because that’s what Flynn would want her to do.

 

Then she’d thought, _Flynn,_ and just like that, everything had dissolved. She’d clung to her mother and sobbed because the adventure was gone anyway. The lights were gone and Flynn was gone and the need to be strong was gone. If Flynn had had any second thoughts, they’d probably disappeared when she’d seen Rapunzel going after the men’s throats like a wild animal.

 

All things considered, she probably would have done the same thing in Flynn’s place.

 

 

~^~

 

She paced from one end of the wall to the other and then back again, and for the first time in her life they suddenly pressed in and it was too dark and _she couldn’t see._

 

She bit down on her fist and dropped into a crouch right where she was, rocking on her heels, squeezing her eyes shut, until her hair was shining and the walls gradually pushed themselves apart again, settling back into the shadows where they belonged.

 

 _I’m sorry,_ she told her hair, burying her face into the still-glowing strands. _I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry._

 

 

~^~

 

 

She took out her paints again. On her canvas she mixed blue with green and green back with blue, but couldn’t quite manage to get the color of Flynn’s vest. She tried again, recalling the shine on the water in the dam, and ran into the same problem. Only one of the blues came close to matching the lake at dusk, and none of them matched the eyes of the shy girl who had helped put flowers in her hair.

 

She went through her supply, dabbing here and blending there, and came to the realization that no matter how hard she tried, nothing was going to look right ever again. If she had greens, they were the greens she’d modeled after the greens outside her window, not the greens she’d seen in the heart of the woods. There wasn’t anything golden enough to match the sunlit canyon or warm enough to describe the campfire or bright enough to replace the bells.

 

Her legs were cramping up. She stood from her stool and cleaned up, replaced her supplies, and flopped back down on her bed again. The ceiling arched endlessly above her, spiraling in on itself pattern by pattern.

 

She felt Pascal slide in against her neck. She cocked her head a little, rubbing her cheek against his pebbly back, not taking her eyes away.

 

Her ceiling had been one of the hardest things to get to in the tower, lacking easy access to the apex. It had taken her two years of on-and-off work just to finish the dome. Once a wall was completed, she never revised it; she’d been staring at these same designs for years.

 

On the other hand her heart was suddenly thudding and her scalp was prickling, and suddenly, suddenly, Rapunzel remembered that she hadn’t just painted the _lanterns_ in the living area. She’d painted the deep blue background and the spaces between them, and that was the reason they’d seemed bright, wasn’t it. Not because of the yellow paint, but because of what was behind them, and—

 

Pascal made a questioning noise. Rapunzel could barely breathe. Not shifting her gaze, she reached behind her, under her pillow. She tugged, and the scarf slid out.

 

She held it up against the ceiling, took it away, and held it up again.

 

Under the rush of blood in her ears, she heard the faint jangling of bells.

 

Rapunzel sat up.

 

 

~^~

 

As it turned out, the ornament in Flynn’s satchel _was_ designed to go on the head.

 

 

 


	8. what falls away is always

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Shards, anchors, suns.

**_what falls away is always_ ** ****

**_\- - -_ **

 

 

 There were so many ways this could have gone, Rapunzel thought. Also now wasn’t the time for thinking. Rapunzel was a princess and everything in the tower suddenly looked like a sun, and somewhere between screaming at her mother that _she hated her, she’d trusted her and this was what she got for it,_ Flynn had somehow found the secret entrance, come up cautiously through the trapdoor, and had promptly been stabbed by Gothel.

 

Now Flynn’s fingers were pressed tightly over her wound and her face was a horrible, chalky white, and Rapunzel was more frightened than she’d ever been in her life. Nothing else came close. She was shaking so badly she could feel her calf muscles spasming. “Come along, Rapunzel,” Mother said. “It’s time to go.”

 

Flynn was convulsing with pain on the floor. Gothel had already yanked Flynn’s knife from her sheath and had tossed it well across the room. Rapunzel couldn’t see where it had ended up. There was a constellation of blood splatters on the floor.

 

“Rap _unzel_.” A brutal yank on the chains around her neck, spilling Rapunzel to the floor. “ _Now._ ”

 

She climbed back onto her knees, swaying. She automatically tried to reach up and wrap her hands around the nearest length of chain, the way she’d always relieved her neck of the weight of her hair, but her wrists only tugged against their restraints.

 

In the back of her mind, Flynn reminded her, _priorities._

 

Her mother was still talking, saying something like _Rapunzel really_ and _don’t make me do something I regret._

She remembered the green in the toddler’s eyes in the town square’s mosaic.

 

_Back or forward._

Flynn kept bleeding.

 

Rapunzel took a breath, let it out slowly, and chose.

 

 

~^~

 

She thrust her heel out at the pot she’d first hidden Flynn’s satchel in, because that was closest to her feet. It was heavy and hurt her foot, but the kick sent it rolling. When Gothel turned to look, Rapunzel was already pitching forward onto a shoulder, bound hands knocking clumsily against the floor, to bowl against Gothel’s legs.

 

Gothel staggered, more out of surprise than anything. Rapunzel rolled to her feet, and while Gothel was regaining her balance, spun on the ball of her foot, kicking her leg up as high as she ever had in ballet practice, and brought her heel down on Gothel’s shoulder.

 

Gothel went down to her knees. Rapunzel made a break for Flynn, feet slapping against the floorboards.

 

A sudden agonizing weight yanked her head back. She instinctively twisted, following it around to avoid snapping her own neck, and saw that Gothel was standing and had a grip on her hair. There was very little love in her eyes.

 

She didn’t have time to think. She extended her stumble, turning it into a half-run, and had time to see a split second of alarm on Gothel’s face before she ducked a shoulder and rammed it into her stomach. They both went down.

 

For a moment everything was a flurry of gold hair and chains and Rapunzel couldn’t break free without her arms, didn’t even know where she ended and her mother began and—

 

Then Gothel grabbed her ear and Rapunzel bit at her instinctively, teeth clicking a breath away from the thin skin of her wrist. Gothel let go. Rapunzel twisted, jerking herself around, kicking blindly. She heard the breath woosh out of Gothel’s chest. She rolled the other way, struggling to her feet, yanking against the weight of the chain.

 

Gothel got a grip on her hair again just as she reached the standing mirror by the staircase. She had just enough time to get behind it before her head was jerked back again. She turned with it, using her entire body to check the mirror as hard as she could.

 

Gothel shrieked, and for a panicked second Rapunzel thought, despite everything, _don’t land on her, don’t let me hit my mother._ Gothel threw herself out of the way just as the mirror exploded over the floor, flinging shards in every direction. Several of them clinked as they slid over the edge of the trap door, shattering on the stone steps below.

 

Her ears were ringing. She picked herself up and raced towards Flynn again doggedly, ignoring the bright bursts of pain in her feet as she stumbled over the glass.

 

She got within a foot when the chain around her neck yanked her back yet again. The sheer force of it this time spun her around and flung her to the floor, knocking the wind out of her.

 

Gothel drew the chain in hand over hand, disheveled and pale and furious; wheezing, Rapunzel struggled to keep up, unable to use her hands or get to her knees, pumping her legs helplessly through the glass on the floor to avoid being strangled. When she was close enough, Gothel grabbed the hair by the nape of Rapunzel’s neck, wrapped it around her fist, and brought Rapunzel’s face close to her own.

 

Rapunzel’s head was forced back and a cold, sharp metal tip found its way underneath the collar, and, with Flynn dying ten feet away, she finally stopped struggling.

 

~^~

 

Strangely, as her mother pressed a knife against her throat, Rapunzel’s mind was on other things.

 

It was the feeling she’d had when she’d splashed her feet in the stream outside for the first time, compared to the feeling she’d had when the water in the cave had risen to her chin. Struggling to breathe in the remaining pocket of air and realizing that no, she’d been wrong about all of that too. Too much of anything could kill her, and beautiful things were no exception. 

 

Gothel was strong enough to hold her for now, but this close Rapunzel could see age beginning to creep in around the edges. Already her skin was getting a little loose around her eyes, streaks of grey hair appearing in the glossy black. It wouldn’t be long before Rapunzel would need to sing for her.

 

Gothel needed Rapunzel to say, _I won’t fight you. I won’t try to escape. I’ll do everything you want if you just let me heal her, and everything will be exactly like you want._

 

Rapunzel had no trouble understanding why Gothel was fighting so hard and so dirty. Gothel was beautiful. She was vibrant and young and strong, and one day in the city had taught Rapunzel just how valuable those qualities were. Centuries of renewal had amplified everything in her mother. Where she’d been passably pretty once she was now stunning, and where there had been an edge of spite before there was now a monster gnashing its teeth in the dark. “That will be _quite_ enough out of you,” Gothel snarled, once she recovered her breath. “I can’t believe your behavior, Rapunzel. You are stopping this nonsense right now and we are _leaving_. Do you understand me?”

 

And just like that… just like that, the rest of Rapunzel’s own anger faded under a sudden wave of grief. Somewhere inside there was the mother who had taught her to read and to sew and to play chess. She wished she could have known Gothel as the girl she’d been hundreds of years ago, singing to herself and fetching water from the well for her own mother, inventing games to play by herself in the forest. Picking herbs and berries for dinner and for tea. Saying their names in the language she now used only in her sleep: _löwenzahn, hagebutte, melisse, rapunzel._

 

Rapunzel heard herself say, “I’m going to heal her.”

 

“Oh ho.” Gothel’s voice held a dangerous lack of inflection. “You’re coming with me, Rapunzel, whether you like it or not.”

 

“No,” Rapunzel said gently. “I’m going to heal her. And then I’m going to save you.”

 

The chain yanked her neck so cruelly her vision swam. When it returned, Gothel’s nose was a scant inch from hers. “ _Save_ me?” Gothel asked, voice just as gentle. Calm outside, while the monster inside her threw itself against the gates. “And just how are you planning to _save me,_ flower?”

 

Rapunzel reflexively reached up to grasp the chain, but didn’t try to pull away. She could hear Flynn’s labored breathing across the room. In and out, she instructed silently. In and out, or I’ll shave youbald. “Or is this you testing my patience?” Gothel’s voice was silk, but her expression was mild, almost curious. “Would you like to test the limits of your magic? Just how far it can heal?”

 

Rapunzel didn’t move as the knife tip traced a path, resting against her cheek, light as a kiss. “How far will the magic go?” Gothel murmured, almost to herself. “Will it heal a severed limb? An ear, perhaps? Your fingers? Or will it only heal them into stumps?”

 

She didn’t allow her expression to change, but she could feel herself beginning to quiver inside. _Back or forward._ Simple things. The way her hand had looked in Flynn’s. How the ants had felt traveling over her skin. The way the trees in the forest had loomed endlessly above her.

 

Inches away, the monster continued to pace behind Gothel’s eyes.

 

The words came slowly. “I’m going to heal her. And you’re going to let her go. And then I’m going to go with you wherever you want to take me. I’ll never bother you again, and I’ll never ask to leave, and you can do whatever you want with my hair until I die.”

 

Gothel’s expression didn’t change. Her eyebrows were drawn so tightly together they nearly touched.

 

“If you don’t let me heal her,” Rapunzel said, “I’m going to make your life miserable. I’ll burn your meals, I’ll beat down the walls, I’ll cover you with paint while you sleep. When I run out of paint, I’ll use the fruit you bring up with you. If you starve me, I’ll scream until your ears bleed. If you gag me, I’ll throw myself out the window. I will never, ever, _ever_ stop trying to get away from you.”

 

Gothel’s eyes were the color of stone. She didn’t move or blink. The blade hovered at Rapunzel’s throat.

 

“I promise,” she said, and felt the sun shudder in her, just a bit, like the blink of an eye.

 

 

~^~

 

 

“Well, that was disturbing,” Flynn wheezed. “And who taught you how to spin kick your mother?”

 

“Don’t talk, okay?” So much blood. Rapunzel’s mouth went dry at the sight of it. She fumbled at the vest’s fastenings, trying to determine the damage underneath, but there were glints of white and _so much blood._

 

“Feels good.” Flynn’s words were slurred. “S’getting hot anyway. Helped air me out.”

 

“Stop talking.” Rapunzel snapped her hair quickly, sending a ripple through it, bringing the end close to her. She pressed down on the wound, trying to ignore the way Flynn arched, trying to ignore the way the blood seeped through her fingers. “I’m so sorry about this,” she whispered helplessly. “I’m so sorry. It’ll all be okay in a second.”

 

Flynn’s back slowly lowered to the floor again. Her face had lost all color. “Tickles,” was all she said.

 

Of course it did. Rapunzel felt hysteria build up in her throat and she swallowed it back down. “Hold still.” She could feel the shard she’d kicked over from the mirror by her knee. Dipping her head further, allowing her hair to curtain her actions, she fumbled without looking and inadvertently nicked herself on the razor edge before curling her hand around it loosely.

 

Flynn’s voice was barely above a breath. “What are you doing?”

 

“Rapunzel, _really_.” Gothel, speaking up from across the room. Her voice carried a note of wry significance, the way it had a thousand times before when she’d caught Rapunzel stalling on completing a chore. “We don’t have all day, you know.”

 

Flynn’s attention was unwavering. “Blondie.”

 

She couldn’t do it. She could. In this moment, she was terrified of what she could do.

 

There was no more time. Rapunzel took some anyway because one way or another, back or forward, this was the end of her life. This was no more grass under her feet and no more insects flitting across the lake after sunset. She deserved this.

 

Still holding the shard, she slid her other hand along Flynn’s cheek, inadvertently leaving a smear of blood. Flynn blinked, so quickly as to be a flutter. “Never told me how you liked the tour,” Flynn said.

 

And there it was – Flynn barging through her carefully-constructed defenses like she’d been doing since the moment she slipped in through the tower window. Rapunzel’s eyes began to burn. “If I’d known you were going to be so much trouble, I would have made you do a hundred curtseys,” Rapunzel said.

 

Flynn’s lips moved a while before she spoke. “Think of how it would’ve upset the chickens.”

 

Gothel spoke up again, her voice tight with impatience. “Rap _un_ zel.”

 

Despite the suspicion in it, Flynn’s gaze was getting distant. “I never told you,” Rapunzel said, voice cracking. “’Eudora’ suits you too. It’s pretty.”

 

“Oh, god,” Flynn groaned.

 

“I like it. I really do.”

 

“ _Stop talking._ ”

 

She pressed her hair down. She readied the shard, and thought, _flower, gleam and glow._

 

Flynn’s breath was dragging harshly in her chest.

 

_Let your power shine._

Her hair began to glow before she even opened her mouth. She moved the shard towards her hair and this would take timing, this would take everything she had in her and more.

 

Flynn’s voice was the barest of breaths against her forehead. “Blondie.”

 

_Three. Two._ “What?”

 

“What did I tell you about taking that hair out?”

 

“What,” she began, and out of the corner of her eye came a glint.

 

Then her head snapped to the side, and Gothel began screaming.

 

~^~

 

For several crucial moments, Rapunzel could only crouch there, thinking _what._

 

Then the weight on her head grew staggering, and she caught herself just as the screams escalated into a roar. It took her several more seconds to realize that Flynn’s bloody hands were wrapped around a loop of her hair, and that her hair was steadily going brown, piece by piece, as Flynn grunted with effort and hacked at whatever she could find with a shard of the mirror.

 

For a second Rapunzel thought that Flynn had somehow grabbed hers from her hand, but no, the shard was still there, and Flynn was still cutting with one of her own. “Go, go, _go,_ ” Flynn gritted.

 

Rapunzel came alive at last. She picked up a coil of her hair from the floor and, without daring to stop and think about what it meant, cut _hard_. The glass slid through as easily as it would through butter. “Flower, gleam and glow,” she gasped, reaching for more even as she continued to sing. “Let your power shine. Make the clock reverse, bring—”

 

Gothel was staggering towards them. There was still hair glowing but more and more there was hair tumbling lankly around Rapunzel’s face, brown like the lock behind her ear. “Bring back what once was mine, _heal_ ,” but Gothel was howling, and when Rapunzel looked at her Gothel’s skin was flaking off like dry paint. The grey eyes were now lidless and bulging, the mouth sagging open grotesquely, dark hair growing stringy and sparse and white.

 

Sheer horror had her forgetting words she’d sung all her life. Rapunzel heard herself scream, but Gothel was already on them, already _there_ , knife clutched in her bony hand.

 

Flynn gave a little sound, somewhere between a groan of pain and a warning. For once, Rapunzel didn’t hesitate at all. The knife whispered an inch from her ear as she moved, severing the gold, and the last of the light in Rapunzel fizzled out as abruptly as a candle. She put all her strength into a clumsy shove, hurling Gothel away from Flynn as hard as she could. Screeching in her mother tongue, Gothel reeled unchecked, staggering blindly towards the window.

 

In an instant Rapunzel saw what was going to happen. All thoughts of betrayal flew from her head. She lunged desperately for her mother, hand outstretched. 

 

She saw one of Gothel’s hands reach for it, the white of bone showing through the rot.

 

Then Rapunzel’s hair caught on something behind her, like an anchor, and she was brutally brought up short. Without ceremony, Gothel tripped over a chair, barked the backs of her knees against the windowsill, and went over the side.

 

Seconds later there was a gruesome thud, and the cawing of startled birds, and then everything was terrifyingly, conclusively silent.

 

Rapunzel sat huddled on the floor, staring at the blue outside her window. 

 

~^~

 

Then Pascal was shaking himself awake in the corner, and coherent thought reemerged, and she remembered, _F_ _lynn._

 

She jerked herself around. Flynn was on the floor where Rapunzel had left her, the shard of glass still in her hand. Scraps of brown hair were scattered around her.

 

Rapunzel threw herself forward, bloodying her knees on glass. She shoved the hair and scraps of Flynn’s vest aside, recoiling when she saw the wound hadn’t closed at all. Not even a fraction. Nothing had been reversed, nothing had been healed.

 

Unable to comprehend it, frozen with horror, she stared as Flynn’s chest rose faintly, shallow and slow, barely pulling in air.

 

_No._ She sprang into action. She tore through the heavy, uneven curtain of remaining hair, trying to find a glimpse of anything gold, but her fingers were shaking and her eyes were blurring and all she was encountering were waves and waves of brown. “No,” she sobbed, frustrated. “No, no, _no._ ”

 

Flynn’s eyes were glazed, staring somewhere past Rapunzel’s ear. “Looks good on you.”

 

“ _No!_ ” With a furious cry, Rapunzel slammed her hands against her chest and before she even knew what she was doing she was singing, but there were no flowers and nothing was glowing.

 

“Come a little closer so I can shave the rest off,” Flynn said, and died.

 

**~^~**

“For god’s sake, don’t you ever stop crying?” Flynn said a magic teardrop later, weak but whole and uninjured and _alive._ Rapunzel was too busy pounding her chest and weeping into the bloody vest to reply.

 

 

 


	9. epilogue - take my waking slow

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Princesses, thieves, dinner rolls.

**_epilogue – take my waking slow_ **

 - - -

 

There had been an older boy Eudora had looked up to back at the orphanage.

 

Every night after dinner he would sit the younger kids down and read another chapter in ‘The Tales of Flynnigan Rider’. When he was finished and everyone else was asleep, he’d take her up to the rooftop, and together they would pretend to steal the stars, closing their fists over the lights one by one.

 

He’d invent stories about how they would set out and hunt down the lost princess together. There’d be fanfare and festivals when they returned, and a mural of them would go up in the town square, because that’s what they did with heroes. Then the king and queen would make her a lady and make him a lord, and they’d be rich, and he’d have the rights to the land out east of the kingdom, and that’s where he’d build their castle. Yes, _he’d_ get the land, because he was the lord and of course lords got the land, not ladies, _so shut it, fatbottom, you’d probably spend all our coin on fruit tarts if we did things your way._

A year later he broke into the palace and stole a bag of jewels from the royal treasury, killing a guard on the way out. The rest of the royal guard caught him in a tavern twelve miles down the river and dragged him back to the dungeon, and, because he was of age by then, because that’s what they did with murderers who stole the king’s treasure, sentenced him to hang at dawn.

 

Eudora had hidden a poker from the hearth in her skirts and had gone to the hanging. She weaved her way into the crowd, pale and tense with the gravity of her plan. She’d wait until their backs were turned, and then she’d take out the poker and beat them over the heads, beat them all dead, and would cut him down with a sword taken from one of the guards. They’d steal a horse from a nearby stable and make their way to the coast.

 

Instead she pushed her way to the front and didn’t go any further. The executioner was a behemoth and there were guards everywhereand the crowd was angry, angry because they loved the queen and hadn’t enough already been stolen from her?

 

The platform had too many steps for her to be able to take them by surprise and she was just a girl, she was just a girl, and he was just a thief.

 

She stood, frozen to the spot, throat closing up, hands sweaty and white-knuckled around the poker, as the officials read off his crime and his sentence, and continued to do nothing when they placed the hood around his head and hit the mechanism and he dropped through the trapdoor and kicked and kicked until he soiled himself and he died, and they took him down and the crowd dispersed and he was gone and she was still there, she was still doing nothing.

 

She went back to the orphanage, climbed into bed with her clothes on, and was sick for a long time.

 

The next week, as soon as she got better, she tied back her hair and gave her dresses to Emila, then put on the clothes he’d left behind. She picked up reading The Tales of Flynnigan Rider to the kids, because she was good at imitating the voices he’d used. A few weeks later, when she stole a tray of pastries at market and saw the others pounce on them at the orphanage, she realized where she’d gone wrong. There were things women couldn’t do, but there were also things men couldn’t do. If Flynnigan Rider could do anything he wanted, it wasn’t because he was a man – it was because he moved on before everyone could figure out how much he was really taking.

 

She cut her hair short anyway. When she left the orphanage, nobody batted an eyelash when she introduced herself as Flynn. After a few years on the road, the concept of ‘Eudora’ became something else, and the concept of ‘Flynn’ had become something else, and both of them were equally true and both of them were equally a lie. She never returned to the orphanage again.

 

“So now you understand,” Flynn said from under three blankets on Rapunzel’s bed, voice a tired rasp, “that if you call me Eudora one more time, I’m going to strip myself naked, rip out all my fingernails, boil my eyeballs in lye, and then hang myself with your dragon’s tongue.”

 

“Go to sleep, Flynn,” Rapunzel said.

 

“I didn’t steal you,” Flynn said. “Right? I didn’t steal you. Tell me I didn’t steal you too.”

 

“No, Flynn,” she said, and wrapped her arms around herself, dry-eyed, as Flynn tossed and turned and talked in her sleep. She listened to the hands on the downstairs clock knock down the hours, one and two and three.

 

 

~^~

 

Maximus tried first to force himself up through the stairwell. Then he started to climb the side of the cliff to fling himself from a ledge and get in through the window.  

 

Rapunzel stopped the attempt before he broke his legs. She fetched him some apples from the larder and buried her head in his mane while he ate them, feeling his broad sides expand with each breath. When he’d finished them, he snuffled her hair experimentally for nearly a minute, and, pronouncing himself disinterested with a stern whuff, proceeded to try to make his way up the stairs again. “No, Maximus,” Rapunzel said. “It’s okay now. I’m fine, and Flynn is fine.”

 

He swung his head towards the cave leading out of the valley, and back to her.

 

“Go back to town.” She could hardly look at the Corona insignia on the saddlebag. Based on how many times she’d found it in her tower in the past few days alone, even in her oldest designs, she was doomed to be sick of it soon. She was already sick of what it meant. “I’ll be okay. She can’t travel yet. I’ll come later, okay?”

 

He fixed an enormous dark eye on her. “Thank you,” she said, and pressed her nose against his for a while.

 

She didn’t look towards the empty cloak on the ground, even when her bandaged feet became coated with chalky residue. After Maximus left, she peeled off the bandages by the stream and scrubbed her feet, over every cut and inside every crease and under every toenail, until every trace of it was gone.

 

 ~^~

 

If she’d entertained any thoughts whatsoever of keeping her hair long, her mind had changed after it became apparent that the magic in it had been the only thing keeping it manageable. She and Flynn had cut unevenly, blindly, grasping at any piece they could find, so it was at some points thirty feet and at others no more than six.

 

Without her magic, even at less than half its original length, Rapunzel’s hair was a crippling weight on her neck and scalp. Where it had seemed to avoid obstacles before it suddenly was catching on everything – rough spots on the floor, ledges, under chair legs. Every time she moved strands would get into her mouth.

 

She’d intended in the beginning to reach up and hack it off, just be done with it and good riddance, but a blind panic at hit her the instant her fingers had touched the scissors. It didn’t matter that her hair lay heavy and brown and useless around her, or that she herself had helped cut it only days before. Eighteen years of reverence had instilled habits unbreakable as a promise. Without the impetus – without the danger – she couldn’t even get close.

 

Unable to look at it, she bundled it blindly up into clumsy braids and loops with whatever she could find – yarn and wilted vine and twine taken from Flynn’s satchel – and tucked it all into a sash around her waist to help reduce the weight on her neck, and tended to Flynn instead.

 

 

~^~

 

 

There had been no visible damage to her body – the stab wound itself had healed without a scar – but Flynn was weak, able to go to the latrine and back to bed and not much else. _Being yanked back from death’ll do that,_ Flynn said. Also, _get me some more hazelnut soup, that stuff is great._

 

Rapunzel fell into routine, surrounded by the comfort of the tower. Breakfast. Cleaning, because the tower was always dusty. Polishing, because silver got tarnished and who else would take care of the tower now that Mother was gone.

 

All the same, Rapunzel knew there’d never be any sliding around on soapy floors again. No singing or painting or playing chess with Pascal, wiling away the hours before her mother yelled up at her to let down her hair, because the fact was, no one was ever coming home again. Her mother wouldn’t praise her artwork or critique her cleaning, saying _excellent job on the banisters, now if you could start on the cupboards tomorrow, hm? That’s my darling flower._

What would happen was eventually, Flynn would take her away from this place, and she’d most likely live at the palace. Without the hearth lit in the winter, the drastic internal changes in temperature season after season would begin to crack the walls of the tower. The dust would settle on the silver and over her books and onto the carpets. Spiders would begin to spin their webs across doorways and inside cabinets and between bedposts. Animals would find their way inside the secret passage, and then, as the cracks continued to grow, moisture would get in and rust the rest of the metal. Her paintings would fade, then fall into ruin.

 

When Flynn’s fever broke, Rapunzel turned back to cleaning in earnest. She swept up the glass from the shattered mirror. She made the beds, including Gothel’s, changed into her work dress, then scrubbed out the brass tub until it gleamed like a cat’s eye.

 

Then she cleaned out the dirt from between the floorboards and organized her books. She went as high as she could go without the help of her hair and dusted from top to bottom, every surface she could get her rag on, then tied her skirts up over her knees and polished every bit of wood she could find, from the doors to the floor to the windowsills to the drawers to the empty mirror frame.

 

Irrationally she thought that if she cleaned everything better than she ever had before, it’d stay that way until she came back for it. If the king and queen didn’t accept her, she and Flynn could always move back in. She knew without asking that Flynn had nowhere to stay. Now that Rapunzel could come and go as she pleased, it wouldn’t be a prison anymore.

 

They could clean out the secret passage, make it the main way up to the tower – maybe even make a pulley system later on. Together they could redecorate. Flynn could build the furniture, and Rapunzel could paint the pieces with flower and sun motifs, and it would be like the castle had come to them. It would be fine. It would be fine.

 

~^~

 

“They’re going to want proof, you know,” Flynn said. “And those pretty green eyes won’t cut it, Blondie. How are you planning to convince them?”

 

“ _I_ know I’m the lost princess,” Rapunzel said. She swung her legs, making the chair legs creak underneath her. “And you do too.”

 

“Yeah, but that’s hardly the craziest thing that’s happened to me this past week,” Flynn said. “Sit still.”

 

Rapunzel ignored her, rearing on her toes, tilting the chair back. Flynn gave an exasperated sigh but didn’t pursue it. “Do you think I look like my mother?” Rapunzel asked. “I mean, my mother at the castle.”

 

“Didn’t you see the painting in the town square?”

 

“Yes, but that’s a painting.”

 

Flynn lifted a shoulder noncommittally. “You really don’t know?” Rapunzel asked.

 

“I mean, you want an opinion based on a painting… sure, you look enough like her to be convincing. But a commoner like me actually getting that close to the queen to study her face?” Flynn shrugged again. “We’ll just have to wing it and see.”

 

Rapunzel frowned a moment, then tried to turn it into a pursed-lips, royal look. The woman in the mural had looked kind and all-knowing. Was that how Rapunzel was supposed to look, as the daughter of a queen?

 

Maybe not. The last week alone had taught her how little she really knew. On the other hand, she now knew that there were far-off cities beyond the sea and little pies that had vegetables in them and winds that traveled to the northeast and brought change with them. If even those tidbits of knowledge had been enough to change her life forever, who knew how her life would change with even just a few more.

 

Flynn picked up the brush and started going through the hair over Rapunzel’s neck. Unexpectedly she said, “The queen is… special. Merciful, I guess is a good word. The prisons don’t have very many people in them. No hanging offenses except murder and stealing from the royal treasury. The queen, she’s… someone you want to love, I guess.”

 

“Do _you_ love her?”

 

“Everybody loves her, Rapunzel.”

 

Rapunzel grew quiet. Flynn continued brushing her hair, dismantling the clumsy loops and working out the resulting tangles with methodical patience, apparently unaware of the gravity in the room. “Great,” Flynn muttered after a minute. “Yarn. And… what the hell is this, _clothesline?_ You actually put clothesline in your hair?”

 

Rapunzel closed her eyes and bunched the fabric of her dress into her fists gently, waiting for the lump in her throat to ease so she could speak again. “I want it short.”

 

“Hm?” Flynn grunted. There was a wilted vine in her mouth, taken from one of Rapunzel’s braids.

 

“I want my hair cut short.”

 

Flynn spat it out and said, almost as an afterthought, “No.”

 

“I’m serious, Flynn.” She twisted her head to look back at her. “Really short. Like yours.”

 

“And I said no.”

 

“It’s my hair.”

 

“And it’s my head, which you’ll bash in with your skillet when you realize that you don’t like it,” Flynn said. “May I ask why you want to get rid of it so badly?”

 

“I don’t know.” Well. She did and she didn’t. Even after everything that had happened, it was still hard for her to articulate what she wanted. Gothel had never tolerated foolishness, and for the most part, neither did Flynn. “So I’ll be exciting and dangerous,” she decided firmly. “Like you.”

 

“I think we’ve already established that you’re dangerous, Blondie,” Flynn said dryly, ignoring the brown hair right under her nose as she had for the last several days, and probably would continue to do forever. “You don’t need a fast and loose haircut to prove it. You don’t need to be like me.”

 

“Maybe I want to. Maybe I’ll become a thief.”

 

Flynn laughed in her face. Rapunzel faced back forward and crossed her arms. “Oh, come on, it was funny,” Flynn said. “You’re a princess. The only things you’re going to be stealing are hearts.”

 

“What about you?”

 

“I’ll be stealing kisses from you,” Flynn said off-handedly, as if it weren’t the corniest thing to come out of her mouth since ‘observe my smolder’. “Let’s just start out slow, all right? There’s no need to rush. Let’s say calf length. You want it shorter after a few weeks, you can tell me, and off it goes, no arguments.”

 

Rapunzel said nothing. “Come on, don’t start,” Flynn said. “If you want it cut that badly, cut it yourself. And find your own scissors to do it. I don’t want any part in it.”

 

Rapunzel twisted around in her seat again to look at her. “But _why?_ ”

 

“Because I happen to think that’s not what you really want, is why. Hold still.”

 

“Not what I really…” Rapunzel could hardly believe her ears. “It’s _my hair,_ Flynn!”

 

“Yeah, I know that, and you know that. I just think you’re confused about the other thing.”

 

“I’ve really thought about this and—”

 

“You’ve really thought about it for twelve seconds. Take two more weeks and then see how you feel.”

 

“Don’t patronize me,” Rapunzel bristled.

 

“ _I’m not._ ” Flynn yanked another piece of twine out of Rapunzel’s hair, making her flinch. “Now hold still, damn it, this is hard enough without you squirming around.”

 

“You’re acting just like my mother,” Rapunzel snapped, reaching up to soothe her sore scalp. “You’re not even _listening_ to me. You don’t know what I want.”

 

“Neither do you.”

 

Flynn’s implacable tone drove her wild. “ _I said I want my hair short!_ ”

 

“And I say you’re being rash and stupid. What’s wrong with waiting? What’s the big hurry?”

 

“Because I…” Her eyes were stinging again, this time from frustration. She balled up her fists and gritted, “It’s none of your business, Flynn.”

 

“You know what? Fine. It isn’t. You’re right.” Unexpectedly, Flynn swept into action. She grabbed the scissors from the table, yanked the blades apart, and gathered up a chunk of the hair over Rapunzel’s neck. “You’re right. Never mind combing it out. We’ll chop it right off, just like mine, nice and close to the scalp so you never have to—”

 

Panic hit her. Without thinking, Rapunzel twisted further, so sharply her back cricked in protest, and snatched Flynn’s wrist before the scissors could descend. They glinted in the light from the window.

 

Flynn’s eyebrows were raised expectantly.

 

Flushing, Rapunzel let her go. She slowly turned around in her chair, folding her arms across her chest tightly. “Fine,” she said. Her voice was dull. “Do what you want. I don’t care.”

 

Flynn was silent. Rapunzel kept her gaze on the wall. She felt cold and shaky, a little ill.

 

She felt a sigh stir the hair by her ear. Then Flynn came around the chair and, unexpectedly, squatted in front of her. She looked tired. “It’s my hair,” Rapunzel whispered, still humiliatingly close to tears.

 

“I’m well aware of that,” Flynn said. “But before I go chomping away like a beaver in a woodpile, I need to know _why._ That’s not too much to ask.”

 

“I…” Flynn’s unwavering, serious attention was hard to avoid. Rapunzel let her gaze drift over the walls, at once achingly familiar and totally, brutally alien. Same images, fresh eyes. “I need a change.”

 

“Seventy feet down to five feet _is_ a change. It’s enough change for ten people.”

 

Rapunzel shook her head slowly, mindlessly, eyes firmly on the wall.

 

Out of her peripheral vision, she saw Flynn slide a hand down over her face. After a minute Flynn said, much quieter, “Slicing your hair down to the nub won’t make anything go away, Blondie. It’ll still hurt.”

 

She barely felt her lips move. “You don’t know that for sure.”

 

“Trust me, it won’t matter how much you chop away. It won’t matter what clothes you wear or where you go. Bad memories, they stay on you like stink. The more you let the past influence your decisions, the longer that stink’ll stay on you.”

 

After a long moment, Rapunzel slowly shifted her gaze. Flynn wasn’t even looking at her anymore. Something past her. Probably something not even in the room. “Did it help you?” Rapunzel asked. “Cutting off your hair?”

 

“For a while,” Flynn said. “But you’re not me. At the end of the day, you’re nobody but you. That’s all I’m saying. If you’re going to make this call… just make sure you’re making it for the right reasons. Make sure you’re making it for you.”

 

 _For me._ Rapunzel turned her head, looking towards the window. She’d stared out of it her entire life, watching her mother leave in the morning and planning her entire day around the time that her mother would get back. Breakfasts, lunches, dinners, chores, hobbies. Spending hours and hours brushing out her hair until it gleamed, even when it didn’t need it, just to see her mother beam at her when she climbed back in the tower for the night.

 

She thought of the queen’s eyes as they looked down at her from the mural, and wondered what it would take to get her to smile. What would make her happy. How hard Rapunzel would have to work in this new place to make sure that…

 

No, she realized slowly. _No._ It would be a good thing if she made the queen happy. But it was no longer her _duty_. Not just as far as the queen was concerned, but as far as anybody was concerned. From now on she could choose who and what was important to her. Flynn, Pascal, Maximus. Painting. The men who sang about their dreams in the tavern. The lake where she and Flynn had kissed. The girl who had braided flowers into her hair. People, things, places she _chose_ to care about.

 

 _My choice,_ she thought, and uncurled her fists from her dress. _My life._

 

“Seen the light, haven’t you,” Flynn said.

 

Rapunzel took a slow, deep breath, and let it out. Again, and again, until the roiling anxiety in her stomach gradually eased. “Flynn,” she said.

 

“Yeah.”

 

She blinked rapidly, then said, “I don’t want my hair cut short.”

 

“I figured as much.”

 

“Not right now.” Rapunzel waited until Flynn’s gaze found hers again. “Someday. When I’m ready. When it doesn’t hurt so much. I want you to be there to do it for me. Okay?”

 

Flynn cocked her head. She opened her mouth to reply, then shut it suddenly, gaze hardening.

 

Startled by the abrupt shift, Rapunzel blurted, “What?”

 

Without answering, Flynn rocked to her feet. Rapunzel held still as Flynn picked up the brush and ran it through the hair over Rapunzel’s ear, gentle but businesslike, then threaded her fingers through it briskly. “What’s wrong?” Rapunzel said tentatively, after a minute.

 

Rather than answering, Flynn shifted the bulk of the hair over Rapunzel’s left shoulder, leaving only the locks over her right ear. Working intently, she began pulling strands away from one other, smoothing locks of hair between her thumb and forefinger until they separated, before carefully working a number of them free. They pricked at Rapunzel’s scalp, but didn’t yield. When she was done, Flynn pulled them off to the side, over Rapunzel’s shoulder so that she could see them.

 

In the shaft of sunlight from the window, twelve gold hairs total gleamed in her palm.

 

 

~^~

 

 

“I’m sorry,” Rapunzel said, scrubbing roughly at her eyes with a handkerchief. “I didn’t mean… I was trying _all week_ not to…”

 

“S’all right,” Flynn said. “I think you needed it. Here.”

 

Rapunzel took the fresh handkerchief from her, thanked her, and blew her nose. “Better now?” Flynn said.

 

She had half-convinced herself she no longer cared. At the sight of the hair, everything that was raw in her reopened.

 

She meant to mimic Flynn’s bravado, say ‘why wouldn’t I be’, but what came out instead was a tremulous, “I miss my mother.”

 

Flynn’s response was predictable. “She wasn’t your mother.”

 

“No, you don’t understand. She…” Rapunzel closed her eyes and then wished she hadn’t. The sight of the skin on her mother’s face bubbling off like a melting candle – the agonized screams in the voice that used to sing her to sleep at night, tell her she was being so _silly,_ Rapunzel, _I told you cooking takes practice, didn’t I?_ – would stay with her for the rest of her life. The stink of the past, Flynn had said, except it hadn’t all been bad. It would have been easier if it had been. “It just doesn’t make sense,” Rapunzel said. “I… if I had these, then how… then _why_ …”

 

“You mean, why didn’t I heal? Why did she die?”

 

“Yes.”

 

Flynn shrugged with one shoulder, but it looked like she already knew the answer. “Try the song,” she said instead. “See what happens.”

 

Rapunzel did, and didn’t tell her that she’d already tried it, tried it again and again and again, placing Flynn’s rapidly cooling hand on her brown hair, singing herself hoarse as she pleaded with every scrap of power in her body to bring her back to life.

 

Just like before, she felt the barest of sparks halfway through the incantation – a fleeting buzz of hummingbird wings, the slightest hint of a summer breeze – and then it was gone, the only sign of activity a faint, almost imperceptible glow from the strands, and then that too was gone. “Not that I’m well-versed in ancient sun-magic or anything,” Flynn said, “but I’d say there wasn’t enough juice. Pretty straightforward.”

 

“I didn’t even finish the song,” Rapunzel said, barely audible. “I thought I was still singing it, but she was coming towards me so fast that I… just forgot. Everything. I’d been singing that song my whole life and somehow, when it mattered most, I… lost it. And then I lost you.”

 

“I dunno, seems to me everything turned out all right.”

 

“No, it didn’t.” Exasperated, Rapunzel turned a frown on her. “You _died,_ Flynn.”

 

“Yeah, but it only tickled.”

 

“You were bleeding everywhere!”

 

“Like I said,” Flynn said. “It tickled.”

 

“If it hadn’t have been for that tear, I… I don’t know what I…” Rapunzel lost track of what she was planning to say, because Flynn was grinning and this made her inexplicably flustered. “Stop it! I’m serious, Flynn!”

 

“You’re always serious, which is your biggest problem.” Flynn nabbed the scissors. “Probably because ten generations of hair are still anchoring you to the ground. Let’s see if we can get you back up into the clouds where you belong.”

 

The gold hairs were still in her hand. Her tears were gone. She still felt shaky, but the last few minutes had whittled her down somehow, pared off the layers of guilt and fear and left her with something that made her heart pound with anticipation. The dust motes in the shaft of sunlight danced with the slightest shift in the breeze, making the air itself come alive around them.

 

Rapunzel squeezed the gold hairs once, then held out her hand so that Flynn could take them. “I’m ready,” she said.

 

“I know,” Flynn said, pushing it back towards her. “Hold on to them anyway.”

 

 

~^~

 

 

When Rapunzel’s head felt substantially lighter and the excess twenty-five feet of hair or so was coiled on the floor, Flynn blew out a sigh and sat back on her heels, muttering, “Think there’s still a deer or two wrapped up in all that.”

 

Rapunzel twisted. “You’re done already?”

 

“More or less. It’ll do for now. I didn’t figure you’d want hair in your face, so I left the front alone.” Flynn worked a kink out of her shoulder and yawned hugely. “We can always change it later. Well? What do you think?”

 

Rapunzel faced back forward, rubbing her thumb over the gold hairs slowly, thinking. “Well,” Flynn said. “Encouraging. You’re awake, right?”

 

“I like it,” she said belatedly. She wondered what her hair looked like. She was glad that the downstairs mirror was broken. As long as she couldn’t see her reflection, the one she remembered from the last time she’d looked still made sense in her head.

 

She handed over the hairs for Flynn to finish cutting.

 

Once again, Flynn refused to take them. She tossed the scissors down onto the table, then crossed the room to get her satchel. After rummaging in it a moment, she returned with a chunky goose feather and a short length of twine. “The one piece you didn’t steal,” she said. “And now I’m giving it to you anyway. At this rate I’ll be kicked out of the thieves’ guild.”

 

“What’s a thieves’ guild?” but Flynn only replied, “Hold still,” so she did. Flynn found the slender lock again, traced the coil of it seventy feet along to its tip, then began winding it around the nub of the feather.

 

It took a while, and occasionally the coils slipped and Flynn had to retrace her steps. Rapunzel could have done it herself in much less time, accustomed to the tricks of her own hair, but she liked the sight of Flynn concentrating so intently, being exquisitely careful not to pull or tangle the hair as she worked. When about a half a foot was left, Rapunzel pinched the feather between her fingers as Flynn directed, and then Flynn tied the length of twine atop the hair to secure it. The feather tickled the top of Rapunzel’s shoulder.

 

“ _There_ ,” Flynn said, stepping back to appraise her own work. “Now you look like any fashionable girl in town. Not the best looking feather in the world, but we can pick up a better one when we roll in there. Queen has a lake-full of swans. I know because the last time I fell in there, they came around to kill me.”

 

She thought maybe she should be crying, but she wasn’t. Instead she reached up and felt it again, running her fingertips over it and the rest of her hair. The soft part over her ears, the silky, darker part underneath the top layer, the sleek ends. Hair that would split, Flynn had told her, if she didn’t take care of it. How do you take care of hair? What do I look like, Blondie, a barber?

 

“While it’s encouraging you’re not screaming, your dead silence is killing me.” Flynn squatted down in front of her again. “Don’t like it? I can always tinker with it a little more. After lunch, though, I’m hungry.”

 

“You know, it would have been easier to cut it,” Rapunzel said, but her fingers didn’t stray from the feather, from the hair wrapped around it.

 

“Yeah, but I’ve got a thing for blondes,” Flynn said.

 

“My hair is brown.”

 

“Good,” Flynn said. “I’ve also got a thing for brunettes. Do you like it or not?”

 

Rapunzel studied her. Flynn was pale as a ghost in one of Rapunzel’s night dresses. But looking better. Stronger. As strong as Rapunzel no longer needed to be, but wanted to be all the same, now that it mattered less than ever before.

 

“I love you most,” Rapunzel said.

 

“Thanks,” Flynn said. “That’s not a yes or a no.”

 

Rapunzel thought, _yes._

 

“Well, we’ve still got a while before we have to make our move,” Flynn said, climbing to her feet. She then proceeded to give herself away by reaching out, tucking a brown lock of hair behind Rapunzel’s ear, lingering maybe a bit too long for professional courtesy, maybe not, and then held out her hand. “You can decide between now and then. In the meantime, now that I’m off my deathbed and not drenched in your magical spirit tears, how about giving me a tour of your house? If I don’t steal at least one thing while I’m here, I’ll lose my credibility.”

 

Rapunzel wondered if joy was supposed to be this painful. She took Flynn’s hand and smiled anyway, because today wasn’t any other day either and these, these were good hurts. Flynn would steal something and maybe she wouldn’t. Either way, there was plenty of time to decide what she’d take.

 

 

~^~

 

 

“Wait a second,” Flynn said. “You mean every time you’ve started bawling on me, they’ve been magic panacea tears? _This whole time?_ And we haven’t been bottling this up to sell it?”

 

“This is the kitchen,” Rapunzel said, and distracted Flynn by shoving a roll in her mouth.

                               

 

~^~

 

“You still haven’t answered whether or not you ever ran naked around your tower.”

 

“Stop talking,” Rapunzel said, and shut her up for the second time that day, this time with her lips. 

 

Which seemed like a fairly reasonable way to end the conversation.

 

 

 

 


End file.
